See that sign? It stinks.

When it comes to marketing stuff smell is a pretty powerful persuader with its ability to touch the parts of us that colour, fancy writing and feel can’t reach. It ‘talks’ our language, set’s us off dreaming and feels like home so  I was not surprised to find smell popping up on  bill boards all over the USA when browsing through my Sunday paper!

Well all of this got me very excited until I read that the first ‘smelly sign’ depicts a great big steak on a fork………mmmmm the smell of dead animal. OK so I do LIKE steak but I must say that seeing a ‘bite sized chunk’ as big as a cow on a giant fork made me want to throw up my coco pops. THEN I saw that the sign and attached odour was placed in an urban area ensuring that everyone got the benefit of this megga meaty treat!  Oh I do hope that the people in this town can stomach it.  Suddenly this piece of marketing genius started to turn a little sour for me as I imagined fishy smells emanating from a giant prawn shop,  cigar smoke from the tobacconist and cabbage from the greengrocer all competing for my mighty dollars.

Smell is powerful but it can also be polarizing – one mans meat is another mans maggot.

So, reading on I am reminded that smell has been used to persuade us into a whole range of situations – there is beer infused darts, lavender tyres (who smells tyres), Waffle scented ice cream stores and aromatherapy infused seminar rooms.  Our senses have been getting assaulted for quite some time, indeed some shopping malls even use scent to make us spend more, relax us or help us to forget where we put our car (evil plan to keep us there for hours and hours).  And we thought that we were living in a free country!

It looks like the writing is no longer on the wall for advertising, it’s in the air, up your nose and in the high street and it isn’t always smelling of roses.

Now excuse me while I have a lie down – I have a headache 🙂

There's nothing like the smell of cow to make you hungry