Rony Garcia of the Wildlife Conservation Society

To wine and dine Sasha, a 450-pound Siberian tiger at the Bronx Zoo, try serving beef and rabbit. To lure him for a snack, whip out the frozen treats his zookeepers call “bloodcicles.” But to really get his olfactory engines running, you need the secret weapon: Calvin Klein’s Obsession for Men.

Zoos have long spritzed perfumes and colognes on rocks, trees and toys in an effort to keep confined animals curious.

In 2003, Pat Thomas, general curator for the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Bronx Zoo in New York, decided to get scientific about it. Working with 24 fragrances and two cheetahs, he recorded how long it took the big cats to notice the scent and how much time they spent interacting with it.

The results left barely a whiff of a doubt. Estée Lauder’s Beautiful occupied the cheetahs on average for just two seconds. Revlon’s Charlie managed 15.5 seconds. Nina Ricci’s L’Air du Temps took it up to 10.4 minutes. But the musky Obsession for Men triumphed: 11.1 minutes. That’s longer than the cats usually take to savor a meal.

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The billboard releases the unmistakable scent of "Smokin' on the Grill."

Story by Jen Aronoff

Commuters on River Highway (N.C. 150) near Lake Norman in Mooresville may find a new aroma commingling with exhaust fumes: The smell of grilled steak, coming from a billboard designed to entice shoppers by appealing to a sense other than sight.

The Bloom grocery store chain, part of Food Lion, erected the giant sign at 1220 River Highway, between a Shell gas station and a storage facility, to promote its new brand of beef. It’ll disperse the scent during rush hour, from 7 to 10 a.m. and from 4 to 7 p.m., every day until June 18, and is visible to drivers heading west, toward Catawba County. It pairs the smell with a big visual, showing a giant piece of steak and a French fry on a giant fork, and is one of the first of its kind in the country.

Bloom worked on the campaign with Charlotte advertising agency Birdsong Gregory and Charlotte-based ScentAir, a leading scent marketing and branding company. ScentAir normally focuses on applying scents to indoor environments, so the outdoor space proved a bigger challenge, the company said.

Though plenty of businesses are using scents to create ambiance and enhance their selling atmosphere, schnoz-targeted ads in public places are fairly rare. The most prominent example crumbled after one day in 2006, amid concern that the smell could provoke allergic reactions and otherwise irritate passers-by. In that case, the California Milk Processing board placed chocolate chip cookie-scented strips in selected San Francisco bus shelters. For its part, Bloom said it hadn’t received any complaints and that its steak scent is safe.

(MYRTLE BEACH, S.C.) – It takes ten to fifteen years to develop a drug. The cost has soared more than 300 percent since 1987 in the pharmaceutical industry’s competitive landscape.

According to Exhibitor Online, that’s why Purdue Pharma L.P., manufacturer of analgesics and other drugs, likes to create a sense of ease in its trade show exhibits and capture attendees’ attention by prescribing a bit of aromatherapy.

For years, the pharmaceutical company baked cookies in its booth.

But, with the 2002 tightening of the health-care industry’s “Pharma Code” that governs pharmaceutical companies’ marketing efforts and activities, Purdue decided to discontinue serving cookies.

When it started looking to reintroduce scent back into the booth, it wanted an approach that would be soothing, comforting, and warm.

A small in-house group tested 20 various scents, such as fresh-cut grass and lavender, on staff and customers. The favorite that emerged was a spa-like scent that suggested the ocean, orchids, and aloe vera.

The Food & Drug Administration confirms that they are aware of this “spa” deal made by Purdue.

Purdue introduced the scent into its 30-by-40-foot booth at the American Academy of Pain Medicine annual meeting. Evoking thoughts of azure seas and exquisite flowers, the scent helped put visitors at ease. Staff also used it as an icebreaker, asking visitors to tell them what they thought of the scent, and how they reacted to it. The scent strategy proved so successful, Purdue has continued using the balmy bouquet in its exhibits to this day.

Natural scents like the one Purdue used can extend dwell time by as much as 40 percent, according to Whiff-Guy C. Russell Brumfield, especially since the older demographic among the show’s audience — specifically attendees age 40 and older — are most likely to find such organic scents appealing. It’s likely that the average American has visited the ocean at some point and therefore may have formed pleasant associations about it when young — a key component in scent marketing.

What scent will make you spend more? Probably a subtle mix of natural herbs, fruits and flowers as blended by fragrance consultants of Singapore’s super-cool, ultra hi-tech retail mall ION Orchard in the heart of the city-state’s main retail precinct in Orchard Road.

Three different scents are pumped through the mall’s airconditioning ducts: one permeates the whole area; another wafts into VIP restrooms reserved for celebrities and the mega-rich; and a third fragrance is used for the ordinary loos used by ordinary shoppers.

Smell is not the only sensory medium used by joint owners CapitaLand and Hong Kong-based Sun Hung Kai Properties to schmooze shoppers as they roam through four floors of high-end designer shops and another four floors of mostly street fashion.

Throughout the 60,000sq m retail space, large LED screens project fashion runway shows and advertising images. ION’s three-dimensional, free-form curvilinear glass and metal facade wraps around 335 stores, restaurants and eateries and its integrated media facade has the potential to transform into one of Asia’s largest LED walls for video screenings.

ION Orchard was designed by British architectural firm Benoy, retail design specialists who created the Bullring in Birmingham and Lend Lease’s Bluewater shopping centre outside London, and at last year’s real estate summit in Hong Kong, MIPIM, it was named best shopping centre in Asia.

Construction of an adjacent 56-level super luxe residential tower is under way. Total cost of both the retail and residential development? A cool $1.6 billion. ($1.56bn).

The research found a dramatic improvement in ethical behavior with just a few spritzes of citrus-scented Windex.

Katie Liljenquist, assistant professor of organizational leadership at BYU’s Marriott School of Management, is the lead author on the piece in a forthcoming issue of Psychological Science. Co-authors are Chen-Bo Zhong of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and Adam Galinsky of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

The researchers see implications for workplaces, retail stores and other organizations that have relied on traditional surveillance and security measures to enforce rules.

“Companies often employ heavy-handed interventions to regulate conduct, but they can be costly or oppressive,” said Liljenquist, whose office smells quite average. “This is a very simple, unobtrusive way to promote ethical behavior.”

Perhaps the findings could be applied at home, too, Liljenquist said with a smile. “Could be that getting our kids to clean up their rooms might help them clean up their acts, too.”

The study titled “The Smell of Virtue” was unusually simple and conclusive. Participants engaged in several tasks, the only difference being that some worked in unscented rooms, while others worked in rooms freshly spritzed with Windex.

The first experiment evaluated fairness.

As a test of whether clean scents would enhance reciprocity, participants played a classic “trust game.” Subjects received $12 of real money (allegedly sent by an anonymous partner in another room). They had to decide how much of it to either keep or return to their partners who had trusted them to divide it fairly. Subjects in clean-scented rooms were less likely to exploit the trust of their partners, returning a significantly higher share of the money.

• The average amount of cash given back by the people in the “normal” room was $2.81. But the people in the clean-scented room gave back an average of $5.33.

The second experiment evaluated whether clean scents would encourage charitable behavior.

Subjects indicated their interest in volunteering with a campus organization for a Habitat for Humanity service project and their interest in donating funds to the cause.

• Participants surveyed in a Windex-ed room were significantly more interested in volunteering (4.21 on a 7-point scale) than those in a normal room (3.29).
• 22 percent of Windex-ed room participants said they’d like to donate money, compared to only 6 percent of those in a normal room.

Follow-up questions confirmed that participants didn’t notice the scent in the room and that their mood at the time of the experiment didn’t affect the outcomes.

“Basically, our study shows that morality and cleanliness can go hand-in-hand,” said Galinsky of the Kellogg School. “Researchers have known for years that scents play an active role in reviving positive or negative experiences. Now, our research can offer more insight into the links between people’s charitable actions and their surroundings.”

While this study examined the influence of the physical environment on morality, Zhong and Liljenquist previously published work that demonstrated an intimate link between morality and physical cleanliness. Their 2006 paper in Science reported that transgressions activated a desire to be physically cleansed.

Liljenquist is now researching how perceptions of cleanliness shape our impressions of people and organizations. “The data tell a compelling story about how much we rely upon cleanliness cues to make a wide range of judgments about others,” she said.

World-class athletes crave routine. Baseball’s Wade Boggs ate chicken before every game. Swimmer Michael Phelps blasts hip-hop in his earbuds before races. Others have a lucky shirt or pair of socks that feel right on their bodies, and nearly all of them watch video of previous events to help visualize a peak performance.

Few bother with smell.

Michelle Roark, the 2009 U.S. freestyle skiing champion, wants to change that. Ms. Roark, who is two classes short of a chemical engineering degree from the Colorado School of Mines, is convinced that the scent from a patent-pending perfume blend that she developed and calls “Confidence” is as important to her success as a good night’s sleep. Before competing, she douses her neck-warmer in the natural fragrance and spritzes it on the back of her neck and behind her ears.

“It’s scientifically proven that smell is closest to our emotions and our memories,” Ms. Roark said during an interview this week from Switzerland, where she is training for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. “Why shouldn’t we use it?”

Like most Olympic athletes, Ms. Roark—who is, at 35, a senior citizen by skiing standards— can’t support herself solely through sports. So when she’s not on the slopes, she can usually be found in a Denver lab mixing essential oils for her fledgling fragrance line, Phi-nomenal.

Leaning on her academic background in petroleum engineering—”I’m refining different kinds of oils now,” she jokes— Ms. Roark now sells six natural scents, all of them blends of essential oils and named for the singular emotional reactions they will inspire—Confidence, Focus, Balance, Adventure, Imagination and what she calls Real, which grounds users in the moment. With skiing taking up so much of her time, her business is only in its early stages, with most of her customers local acquaintances in the Denver area.

One of her biggest expenses is natural rose oil, which requires some 60,000 roses petals to make a single ounce and sells for as much as $5,000 per liter.

Ms. Roark mixes all of the potions herself at her lab in Denver. She bases the ratios of the oils in her blends on the “Golden Ratio,” also known as the phi, or the number 1.618. Approximations of this proportion appear both in nature, such as in the length of the stems of plants and DNA strands, and as the basis for some of the most treasured works of art and architecture, from the Parthenon to Salvador Dali’s “The Sacrament of the Last Supper.”

Scientific studies have shown that smell and emotion exist in the same network of neural structures known as the limbic system—an ancient core of the brain that dates to the beginning of human evolution. People might experience the connection when the smell of baking cornbread returns them to a Thanksgiving morning decades ago.

Ms. Roark’s research is designed to take this connection to a practical level by creating a concoction that will be as universal in its ability to improve performance as aspirin is in relieving headaches. Her scent, “Confidence” is a mix of rose oil from Bulgaria, bergamot from Italy, and grapefruit from Florida. She insists that these scents help her succeed and that they can be used to create the same emotional effects in others. (Aromatherapists say grapefruit oil can be used to generate lightheartedness, rose oil is often used to treat grief or loss and rid people of negative feelings and bergamot oil can improve mental focus.)

“It’s not just mumbo-jumbo,” said Ms. Roark, who has a salon/spa and perfumery set to open in December. “There is a science behind it.”

Some scientists are skeptical. The scents themselves, they say, are only as powerful as our associations with them. Grapefruit oil may energize one person’s nose, but will produce a starkly different reaction from someone who spent his childhood getting beat up by a bully who ate grapefruit for breakfast each morning. “The scent is an artifact of the expectation,” said Bert Hayslip, a professor of psychology at the University of North Texas. “An athlete believes it’s important to success, so therefore it is important.”

Jim Fannin, a motivational guru who has worked with athletes including Alex Rodriguez, said he does not believe there is a universal scent that inspires confidence. Rather, athletes perform best when they relax and focus on the task at hand. Mr. Fannin said one former client, a baseball player, would settle himself down in the batter’s box by imagining the smell of oatmeal with brown sugar, which he found comforting.

“Smell will correlate with an experience on a subconscious level,” Mr. Fannin said. “Peppermint puts me at ease, but it’s personal.”

Ms. Roark, who grew up in Denver, has spent a lifetime turning lemons into lemonade. A top competitive figure skater as a child, she had to give up the sport at 15 because her family could no longer afford the lessons. She switched to skiing, which required little more than a youth season pass to the nearby Winter Park ski area. A year later she made the U.S. team, and in her 20s she once held down three jobs and slept in a tent to help support her skiing career.

Ms. Roark says the idea that she could harness the power of smell to conjure confidence and bring about victory in sports first came to her in 2005 while working with the sports psychologist Karen Cogan, who counsels several members of the U.S. freestyle ski team.

Freestyle skiing encompasses aerial acrobatics and lightning-fast runs down steep terrain covered with boulder-sized bumps, known as moguls, demanding an intense level of confidence and commitment to the task. To hesitate even slightly during 360-degree twists and flips on skis is to invite catastrophe. To build confidence, Ms. Cogan encouraged Ms. Roark to use all five of her senses, including a scent she favored, to enter the kind of flow state where she could sense the onset of a perfect run down a 750-foot slope of moguls.

Ms. Roark finished 18th in the Winter Games in Torino after bobbling the landing on a jump during her first run. She was wearing Confidence at the time and had won two World Cup events heading into the Games, but she lost control of her jump in mid-air. It was, after all, only her first season of using the fragrance and she was still adjusting to its effects, which have completely changed her approach to competition.

“I had no idea what it smelled like to ski well,” she said.

CHARLOTTE, N.C., October 7, 2009

With more than 640,000 square feet and eight floors of shopping, ION Orchard houses more than 300 shops, including international fashion favorites, new-to-market brands, unique store concepts, creative food and beverage offerings and first-of-its kind mall features. ION Orchard delivers a holistic, multisensory lifestyle experience with a distinctive mix of style, design and art.

To help create that experience, ION Orchard turned to ScentAir and its Singapore distribution partner, AllSense. Together the companies designed the scent concept and created several signature scents for ION Orchard.

“Our vision for ION Orchard was to create an experience – an icon fitting of its unmatched location at the gateway to one of Asia’s most vibrant shopping strips,” said Ms. Soon Su Lin, Chief Executive of Orchard Turn Developments. “True to the multisensory experience promised to guests, the mall will offer customized ION Orchard Signature scents ensuring a complete and engaging experience to any visitor.”

In addition to the ION Orchard Signature scents, fragrances such as White Tea and Thyme, Tropical Spice, Fresh Apple, Sandalwood Fire and Baby Powder are used subtly throughout the mall through ScentAir’s HVAC, in-ceiling and portable ScentWave systems.

“ION Orchard is leading the way in redefining the retail experience,” said David Amaral, Vice President of International Business for ScentAir. “We are excited to be a part of this breakthrough retail concept in such a vibrant international market.”

ScentAir offers global service capabilities in 56 countries through its 23 distribution partnerships. For more information, please visit www.scentair.com.

About ScentAir
ScentAir Technologies, Inc. (www.scentair.com) is the leading global provider of scent marketing solutions. ScentAir’s patented delivery systems and high-quality fragrances help enhance environments, communicate brands and create memorable experiences for clients around the world. ScentAir offers a full spectrum of scent delivery solutions from large-scale dispersion systems to self-contained fixtures for distributing scent in commercial environments. ScentAir’s technical deployments are also found in engineered systems for military training and aviation simulation. ScentAir is a privately held company located in Charlotte, N.C.

About ION Orchard

ION Orchard (www.ionorchard.com) is the retail component of the retail-cum-super-luxury-residential Orchard Turn development, jointly owned and managed by Singapore’s CapitaLand Limited and Hong Kong’s Sun Hung Kai Properties Limited.

About AllSense

With offices in Sydney, Australia and Singapore, AllSense (www.allsense.com.sg) is a pioneer in the creation, deployment and measurement of experiential media for brands and retailers.  AllSense partners with ScentAir Technologies Inc, a global presence in aroma marketing solutions and scent delivery systems.