Symbolic and Visceral, Smell is a Powerful Brand Language

In today’s rapidly changing retail environment, luxury brands are searching for different ways to reconnect with their customers. On a quest to create direct connections and encourage greater engagement, they’re realizing that scent is a direct and powerful solution for this retail challenge.

Imagine if a brand had the power to make its customers feel happier or more relaxed. Imagine if they had the opportunity to inspire customers to stay longer or spend more money. This is olfactive branding. At 12.29, we use the visceral language of scent to transform brand building. We control emotion. We influence behavior. We change the way you see, and more importantly the way you feel about brands and experiences.

Dawn Goldworm, the Creative Director & Nose for 12.29, says “smell is often an overlooked element of the luxury experience, which is surprising considering our sense of smell is so intrinsically linked with our feelings and emotions. If you walk into a space that has thoughtfully designed architecture and impeccably curated design, you’d think you’re having a luxury experience. However, if the space smells unpleasant, that luxurious experience is immediately diminished.”

The 12.29 creative process, perfected over decades of research, studies a brand’s aesthetics, shapes, sounds and target market and translates these elements into a scent identity. This scent identity does more than simply make a space smell nice. Because it is tailored to all aspects of the brand’s identity, it creates an emotional bond between the brand and its customers.

Initially, the scent is used in the brand’s physical environments. To communicate a consistent, engaging and poignant experience, 12.29 also creates scented products for a 360° branding approach.

12.29 evolves the modern luxury experience for hospitality, fashion, transportation and retail companies around the world. By using a brand appropriate scent, we create an emotional space around your audience, building and nurturing a community around shared feelings and powerful bonds.

Retail brands have focused heavily on design and aesthetics to make their environments and spaces look good. Smell being the most natural and powerful way to make people feel good has the opportunity to answer the current in-store retail challenge by re-engaging emotion and memory with olfactive branding

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