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October 24 2006
Just as I was opening a DSW Shoes mailer addressed to my wife, I was hit unobtrusively with a vaguely tropical, slightly oriental, and clean scent wafting from the envelope that contained a $10 off coupon. Oddly, that same day I read an article in Forbes magazine that highlighted the newest trend in brand marketing: the signature scent.
Understand, DSW wasn’t the department store circular smacking you with a cologne sample, this was a signature scent intended to be pleasing and intended to be smelled after opening the envelope.
This sort of marketing seems to be happening with retail applications with greater regularity. A Google search for scent marketing turned up the Scent Marketing Institute and about 2M hits for related sites.
Wow.
Just as a brand has a visual, a verbal and a tone/manner vocabulary, so to it should have a scent cue—a whiff that evokes the brand.
If you think about it, this is all around us, we just don’t always overtly clue into it. A Hershey’s bar is its own scent, immediately recognizable, and there are a million other things that immediately evoke a memory. Old spice smells like my Grandpa and English Leather smells like my Dad, Maxwell House coffee smells like a loooooong drive to Florida fromIndiana with the offending scent occurring early in the morning as the hot, brown stuff was poured from a thermos in the car. Victoria Secret’s Pear Glaće smells like a every single woman in their twenties in the late 90’s.
The leading company in the space, ScentAir Technologies, has 1480 such fragrances. These are mostly airborne applications—like the time when I’ve stayed at Doubletree hotels, walking in at 10:30 pm after a long day of travel and I’m immediately hit by the warm, homey scent of chocolate chip cookies. Oh, the scent may actually come from the warm cookies they give at check-in, but it’s also likely enhanced by the scent being puffed in.
Interesting, huh?
This excerpt from Forbes sums it up:
“Smell has a greater impact on purchasing than everything else combined,” says Alan Hirsch, neurological director of the Smell & Taste Treatment & Research Foundation in Chicago. "If something smells good, they product is perceived as good."
While ScentAir seems to be dominating the scented air niche, there are numerous other providers that do scratch and sniff varieties of scents.
And here’s where I think the wine industry can do something really cool: if 98% of wine is purchased at point of purchase and if a wines’ taste is predominantly dominated by its bouquet, why the heck doesn’t somebody do tasteful, clean, elegant scratch and sniff applications on a shelf-talker, a hang tag, or the bottle and have it include blueberries, blackberries, lychee’s, leather, earth, or whatever else make up the flavor components of the wine?
It would take a winery that is pretty progressive—maybe the guys at Twisted Oak or Josh at Pinot Blogger (though I’m not sure either have much in the plans for traditional retail), but as an Alpha Consumer I think this would be a killer application to differentiate in a sea of labels.
Check out these links for a couple of interesting articles.
October 21 2006
Ahem, what’s the saying? ... Martha Stewart in the kitchen and Jenna Jameson in the bedroom ... or something like that ... there’s a lot to be said for the dichotomy of nurture and nature.
The Italian varietal aglianico is something like that. It grabs you firmly, doesn’t let go, but caresses with a velvet touch.
Or, as the October Saveur magazine describes the wine: ‘Mistress of the Dark.’
Saveur remarks:
Think of brawny, dark, powerful wines that are also fresh and elegant; wines that combine smoke and bitter chocolate with sweet herbal flavors when young, then develop surprising delicacy and haunting fragrance with ten or 20 years of age; wines that remind many tasters of great nebbiolo ... virtually all young aglianico is forbiddingly tannic, though. Even at a tender age, it may prove a tasty match for spicy salumi, gamy ragu, or juicy beef dishes, but it will provide greater satisfaction if it’s aged in the bottle for a decade or more.
Reading this article prompted me to pull the cork on the 2002 Caparone Aglianico.
I visited Caparone in July on a swing through Paso Robles. A charmer of a winery, it’s a small operation run by Dave Caparone with help from his son Marc. They make 5 or 6000 cases of wine with limited distribution, some sales at a lone Trader Joe’s in California and some on-premise placement in New York. Everything else is sold at the winery or via the wine club. In fact, Dave told me on my visit that they are in the midst of scaling back to about 3000 cases
The thing that stands out about these wines is their positioning as everyday, enjoyable, Italian-style full-bodied wines. They are certainly priced that way—all of them are $14 a bottle, but the thing is, these wines are exceptional values and would be a steal at $30 a bottle.
Unfined and unfiltered, these wines are made with a minimal amount of intervention and are beautiful in a very graceful way.
The aglianico is an interesting story because it’s very rarely found domestically. In Dave’s words (excerpted from their site):
Aglianico was much more difficult to obtain than Nebbiolo or Sangiovese. I initially inquired at UC Davis but was told they didn’t have any. I was however, told of a vine collection owned by the Germplasm Repository, a Federal agency, which reputedly contained Aglianico. I was given permission to visit the collection and to obtain cuttings for propagation later on. In the early fall of 1986 I visited the vineyard. Doctor Harold Olmo of UC Davis was good enough to go with me to help identify the Aglianico vines, which were in several different locations.
This is the first experience I have had with aglianico and to describe it as tannic is an understatement. This is a burly wine that is drinkable now, but has enough bite that it’s certainly best paired with food.
On the UC Davis scale I gave it an 18. I really like this wine, and all of the Caparone wines. My notes for the wine:
This is a flavorful, mouth-filling, bracing wine with ample tannic structure that will let it age for years, balanced with enough zingy acidity to drink young. Dark berries and plums in the nose with a more berries and a touch of cranberry, leather and pepper on the palate and a medium long finish, this is a wine to enjoy with a hunk of red meat, grill optional, but appreciated. I gave it an 18 out of 20. Excellent.
I joined the Caparone wine club in the summer and just received a note prior to the October shipment indicating that they have determined the number of club signees they will allow in total. There’s still room, but I’m not sure how many more people they will take on. My advice is to join, join, join! At $14 a bottle, and discounted to –I think- $12 a bottle as a part of the club, you cannot go wrong with these—the aglianico grips you with a velvet touch and all of the wines engender the kind of fandom that would make a man brag about his conquest.
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