When prospective clients visit your senior care facility, you want them to imagine living there and calling it home.
The quickest way to make visitors feel at home in your senior care facility is through the sense of smell.
Why?
Consider these facts:
- Research shows that our sense of smell is the strongest sense and the one tied most closely to memory and emotion.
- 75% of our emotions are generated by smell, which means we are 100 times more likely to remember what we smell.
- A Rockefeller University study shows that in the short term, we remember 35% of what we smell versus only 5% of what we see and 2% of what we hear.
Clearly, the sense of smell can be one of your strongest allies in making future clients comfortable and helping them feel at home.
How Scent Works
Scientific studies have shown that the sense of smell is connected to the memory center of the brain (the limbic system), which can recognize thousands of scents, recalling memories associated with them.
New scenting technology uses high-quality aroma oils and cold air diffusion systems that enable fragrances to be dispersed evenly and over large spaces. These systems atomize high quality aroma oils, convert them into molecules and disperse them throughout the environment.
Thousands of scents and scent combinations are available. Scents that are scientifically proven to connect with the brain’s memory center and help influence our emotions.
Scents That Can Make Your Visitors Feel At Home
Here are five scents that can help to make your future patients and their families feel more comfortable when considering your senior care center as their new home.
Vanilla: The scent of vanilla is, perhaps, the most universal scent of childhood. Baked into cookies and poured into milk with a spoonful of sugar, vanilla has been a part of the American child’s culinary landscape for decades. It’s no wonder then, that the scent of vanilla can have a nostalgic effect on visitors to your senior care facility – taking them back to their childhood memories and making them feel right at home.
Cinnamon: Not to be outdone by vanilla, this memorable spice also conjures up culinary memories. But even better: a study conducted among 100 participants proved that cinnamon is the scent most closely associated with nostalgic memories of Christmas. And what makes you feel at home more than scent of Christmas?
Citrus: For decades, lemon, orange and grapefruit scents have been used in household cleaning products, giving these aromas a strong memory correlation with cleanliness and order. Evoking those memories in your senior care facility reinforces the impression that your center is kept clean and well-maintained.
Floral: The familiar scents of roses, gardenias and other flowers take seniors back to a time when they literally stopped to the roses. Perhaps they recall the scent of a certain flower at their grandmother’s house, a bouquet of anniversary roses, or memories of their home garden. Make a connection with a floral scent and you may have a patient for life.
Baby Powder: Funnily enough, experts say that the scent of baby powder brings back memories of the safety and security we felt as children. Not a bad emotion to tap into when one is shopping for a senior care facility.
Scent: What Your Visitors Will Remember
Whether you scent your lobby with just one of these aromas, or use several of them in targeted areas, these nostalgic scents can tap into the memories of your visitors and help establish a strong emotional connection with your senior care facility.
And that would make scent one of the wisest marketing investments that your visitors never see.
