Upscale British shirt retailer Thomas Pink also takes pains to convey a signature smell. It has introduced sensors in stores, including ones that have opened recently in New York, Boston, Washington and San Francisco, which emit the smell of freshly laundered cotton whenever customers pass.

"The fragrance is air-dried linen, which is very evocative," says Ms Liz Sowden, Pink's head of advertising and promotions. Some customers like the smell so much they want to buy it, she says. (It isn't for sale.)

Now more than ever there's more to advertising than meets the eye. Highly specialised sensory marketers are busy devising ways for marketers to tap the other four senses. "We interact with each other using all five senses, so why, when companies are hoping to build relationships with consumers, do they only rely on the visual?" asks Mr Geoff Crook, head of the sensory-design research lab at Britain's largest art and design school, Central St Martins College.

Market research indicates that people absorb 83 per cent of their information visually, Mr Crook says, but he attributes that to lack of other options. A better way for retailers and other companies to reach the hearts of new shoppers and steady customers, he says, is through their noses.

Companies preaching the benefits of sensory marketing have to overcome a somewhat wacky image, created by the likes of 3-D glasses and odoriferous scratch-and-sniff perfume ads. Although much of the technology isn't ready for prime time, they are sure they're on the right track. "Much of this isn't ready yet for mass production," says Mr Crook. "But we're getting there."

Floorgraphics Inc., a five-year-old Princeton, N.J., company that puts advertising on supermarket floors for consumer-product giants such as Procter & Gamble Co. and Unilever, is heading into new territory. Starting next year, it says it will offer ads featuring aroma, speech, text and animation options.

Mr George Rebh, Floorgraphics' executive vice-president, says a soap company, a shampoo company and a coffee company have expressed interest in scent-emitting ads. He says the scent probably wouldn't be fuming 24 hours a day. Shoppers would activate the aroma by stepping on text in the ad that says something like, "Step here for scent." A hidden device, perhaps under a nearby shelf, would emit the appropriate smell.

Touch also is underutilised in marketing, some marketers believe. Britain's Asda grocery chain, a unit of Wal-Mart Stores Inc., removed the wrapping from several brands of toilet tissue in its stores so that shoppers could feel and compare textures. The result, the retailer says, was soaring sales for its own in-store brand, resulting in a 50 per cent increase in shelf space for the line.

A secret to making sensory marketing work is that it must feel personal, says Mr Crook. Each consumer should feel like the only one experiencing the message. Proponents of sensory marketing believe computers and the Internet are the next step. P&G is doing research with aroma "printers," which emit scents the way computer printers spit out documents. P&G sees the gizmos as a marketing tool that could one day dispense the aroma of detergent, skin lotion or other products inside stores. P&G and DigiScents Inc., an Oakland, California developer of hardware and software to equip computers to emit scents, earlier this year formed a "strategic research alliance." Terms weren't disclosed.

Los Angeles online candy company eCandy.com Inc. has partnered with DigiScents. ECandy says it is working with DigiScents to "scent-enable" its Website. Step One: Make sure at least 100 consumers and 100 retailers have the smelling devices on their computers by the middle of next year.

DigiScents has come up with a "smell attachment" for computers, a speaker-like device with a cartridge storing scores of natural and synthetic oils. When a user selects a scent, the appropriate oil is dispensed and the smell blown out of the device by a small fan. There's just one little snag: The prototype isn't ready for sale yet. But eCandy is unfazed. "We want to be on the cutting edge, regardless of the timing of the product launch or its acceptance," says Mr David Kim, the company's chief executive. "Smell would be an enticement for these folks to try new candy products."

The Wall Street Journal