Marketing

Bath & Body Works campaign is all about the power of scent

Photo: Heorshe - stock.adobe.com

May 14, 2025

Bath & Body Works aims to connect with shoppers via what the brand believes is the most important sense: smell.

The personal care and home fragrance brand's latest campaign, 'Come Back to Your Sense," illustrates the power that fragrance has when it comes to connecting a person to their emotions, memories and moods, according to a press release.

"While today's consumers live in a largely digital world where sight and sound reign supreme, the reality is our sense of smell can connect us to our most vibrant life experiences – from the feeling of being on the beach, a cherished family memory, or your signature scent that makes you feel like you," Jamie Sohosky, chief marketing officer at Bath & Body Works, said in the release. "Bath & Body Works believes passionately in the important role fragrance plays in our daily lives, and through Come Back To Your Senses, we are on a mission to ensure no one ever takes their sense of scent for granted again."

The brand will be connecting scent and sound this summer to music festival goers via Bath & Body Works' Scent x Sound Labs. At the upcoming Just Like Heaven and Sand in My Boots festivals, attendees will experience an immersive, multi-sensory experience where fragrance and music converge to create a unique scent-memory connection.

A good majority, 86%, of consumers said it is easy to take sense of smell for granted, yet 78% said it is important to their overall well-being, according to a Bath & Body Works survey done with market research firm Reputation Leaders.

Americans rank sense of smell as the "least important" of their five senses while also reporting how critically important it is. Additional findings include:

• 72% agree "fragrance makes their lives better."
• Two out of three said fragrance is "essential to self-care" (65%).
• Half (50%) said "a day without the scents they love is like a day without sunshine."
• Nearly four and five respondents reported feeling that fragrance has the power to transport them to another place or time (78%), while more than half (54%) say that scent has the effect of stopping them in their tracks, or "arresting time" all together.

Bath & Body Works operates more than 1,890 company-operated Bath & Body Works locations in the U.S. and Canada and more than 525 international franchised locations as well as an online storefront at bathandbodyworks.com.