SCENTS OF THE CITY

TitleSCENTS OF THE CITY
BrandTHALYS TRAIN NETWORK
Product/ServiceTHALYS HIGH-SPEED RAIL TRAVEL
Category D05. Sculptural Brand Installation & Experience
Entrant ROSAPARK Paris, FRANCE
Idea Creation ROSAPARK Paris, FRANCE
Production BIRTH Paris, FRANCE
Additional Company L'ASSOCIE PARIS, FRANCE
Credits
Name Company Position
Jean-Francois Sacco ROSAPARK Co-founder Chief Creative Officer
Gilles Fichteberg ROSAPARK Co-founder Chief Creative Officer
Jean-Patrick Chiquiar ROSAPARK Co-founder
Jamie Standen ROSAPARK Creative Director
Mark Forgan ROSAPARK Creative Director
Delphine Drutel ROSAPARK General Manager
Vincent Rodella BIRTH Director
Blanche Depondt ROSAPARK Art Director
Soraya Cotton ROSAPARK Account Director
Camille Hemet ROSAPARK Account Manager
Mickael Mougenot ROSAPARK Head of Amplification
Hugo Legrand BIRTH Executive Producer
Tristan Beraud BIRTH Executive Producer
Pauline Germain ROSAPARK PR Co-ordinator
Theda Braddock ROSAPARK PR Co-ordinator
Gilles Rivollier L'ASSOCIE Production Designer
Leonard Marchal DROM INTERNATIONAL Lab consultant
Elisabeth Carre NOSE CONSULTING Perfume designer
Laetitia Deville THALYS Brand and Communication Manager

The Campaign

The idea was to create a travel agency with a twist. Instead of choosing your destination through Tripadvisor, or by looking at images, or by asking your friends on Facebook, you would choose your destination via one simple filter: scent.

Creative Execution

We researched hundreds of iconic scents from the destinations on the Thalys network and incorporated them into a temporary travel agency. The scents, created by Drom Laboratory in Paris, were soaked into beads that were housed in 752 unique metal tubes. Each tube had a number on it, which corresponded to a destination on one of four maps of Paris, Cologne, Amsterdam and Brussels. People could interact with the installation, find the scents that they liked, and then go to the maps and discover which cities and destinations the scents corresponded with. The scents ranged from ‘cut grass’ to promote the FC Koln football stadium in Cologne, to ‘latex’ to promote the Erotic Museum in Amsterdam, to ‘fresh baguette’ to promote the up and coming east district in Paris. Hosts were onsite to help people book promotional tickets.

Indication of how successful the outcome was in the market

The travel agency launched in April in Paris and travelled to Brussels in May. Journalists and influencers were invited to the events, and the travel agency was open to passers-by. Thousands of potential travellers dropped in to try out the travel boutique. After the disastrous years of 2015 and 2016, reservations are trending upwards again, and more and more tourists are taking Thalys trains to enjoy the unique scents of Paris, Brussels, Cologne and Amsterdam.

The travel business most often uses images to motivate people to buy tickets and travel. But in recent times, the image of European destinations has been hijacked by danger and negativity. Terrorist attacks, real and imagined. Our strategy was to bypass images altogether and employ a sense perhaps even more evocative: scent.