From Church Marketing Sucks:
Endorphin branding. Does your church do it? Maybe I should tell you what it is first.
Per Newsweek (reporting a P.R. e-mail), endorphin branding is “the use of scent as a means of imprinting a highly emotional, positive experience in tandem with a targeted signature scent, which can be reintroduced at a later time to trigger and recreate the desired response.”
Every now and then, a completely random smell will draw me in to some inexplicable happiness from my past. So here’s the question to ask yourself, “Does my church have a smell? Or does my church stink so bad that its smell wouldn’t trigger happy memories?”
Maybe putting a church scent in your style guide is the next step in church branding.
At first glance I thought this idea was kind of silly. I could see some churches spraying Fresh Baked Cookie Scent around to entice warm happy feelings. However, God—on more than one occasion—mentions the pleasing aroma of sacrifices. It seems to me that the idea that smell as a viable sensory input for worship is not one we should easily dismiss.
There are many traditions in Church history that utilize scent in the worship service, and I’d imagine that the mere whiff of those incenses could put those that grew up with them into a more spiritually aware state.
Thoughts?
[photo from flickr user Summer Luu]
