Question

Read the following extract and answer the questions that follow:

When a Scented Candle Just Won’t Do
A fragrance called green tea blows through the corridors of Sonesta hotels worldwide courtesy of Air Esscentials, a 10-year-old company in Miami that sells scent-diffusing systems. Green tea lemongrass, another Air Esscentials creation, is the aroma of choice at Morgans Hotels worldwide. Now, those very same smells are also perfuming the living rooms and bedrooms of many private residences.
Hotels, resorts and casinos, as well as retailers like Victoria’s Secret and Thomas Pink, depend on ambient scents to strengthen brand identity — as well as to get customers to linger and spend. Piping in those fragrances has long been the principal business of Air Esscentials, Aroma360, ScentAir and their rivals in what is known as the air care business. But increasingly, these companies are finding a new revenue stream in the home market. (In other words, pull out those plug-ins.). ―Our company grew rapidly because when we would put a scent into a Sonesta hotel or a Ritz-Carlton or a Melia resort, guests would go up to the front desk and ask how they could get it,‖ said Spence Levy, president of Air Esscentials. ―The home market has grown 35 percent a year for us every year since we started in 2007.‖
Drugstores and other retailers are fully stocked with low-cost home fragrances, from room sprays to candles and wall plug-ins. Now, thanks to Air Esscentials and other such firms, there are options on the higher end: compact yet high-powered diffusers that will infuse scent throughout a room for hours or days at a time. Examples include Aera, a $200 device the size of a paperback book that its parent company, Prolitec, says can perfume a room of up to 2,000 square feet, with fragrance levels adjustable through an app. Each fragrance capsule costs $50 and, according to Aera’s website, will last about 60 days if it is placed in ―a 450-square-foot room, on an average setting running for 24 hours per day.‖
Jeanette Wolfe, a holistic health educator, is a big fan of such devices and a big believer in the power of scent to increase energy and ―drop you into a calm place,‖ as she put it. She used to rely on old-fashioned methods to perfume her Victorian home in Princeton, N.J.: dried flowers
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and squares of muslin that were infused with essential oils and placed in the air vents. ―But it  

wasn’t as strong or clear or efficient a scent as I wanted,‖ Ms. Wolfe said.
Now each floor of the house has its own fragrance dispersed by an AroMini, one of several styles of cold-air diffusers for the home made by AromaTech. According to the company, AroMini, a 12-inch-tall cylinder that costs $279, is strong enough to imbue fragrance in a 1,000square-foot room. The essential oil or aroma oil refills cost $16 to $180, and last about a month.
The home fragrance market is a $6.4 billion business at the retail level, according to a 2016 study by Kline, a market research and consulting firm in Parsippany, N.J. Using data from a Simmons national consumer survey, the online research company Statista calculated that 73 percent of Americans used room deodorizers and air freshener sprays last year; the figure is poised to hit 77 percent by 2020.
More than just a way of eliminating odor, home fragrance has lately become a means of selfexpression. ―It’s an element of design, like the colors on the wall or the furniture — it’s a way for people to communicate who they are,‖ said Richard Weening, chief executive of Prolitec, the Milwaukee-based commercial air care company that recently introduced Aera. ―I do not think I’ve met an individual who doesn’t respond to scents,‖ Ms. Wolfe said.
Actually, some don’t respond well. Consider the people who are allergic to perfumes or just don’t like them. The ―fragrance free‖ movement, which uses the tagline ―think before you stink,‖ has tried for years to beat back the use of fragrances in public places, in deference to the scentsensitive. Still, there are many who consider lemon-infused air to be a luxury, maybe even a necessity. ―The general principle is: People like places that smell good, and they don’t like places that smell bad,‖ said Mr. Weening of Prolitec.
To hear him tell it, the conventional tools deployed for making a place smell good — candles, sprays, wax melts, reed diffusers, and so-called liquid electricals like plug-ins — leave something to be desired. The scents are heavy, inconsistent and, in his view, maybe just a bit unrefined. ―It’s that New York taxicab smell,‖ Mr. Weening said. Two years ago, Dimitri Gailit, the chief executive of AromaTech, based in Vancouver, British Columbia, noticed that his company was fielding calls from clients who wanted their residences to smell as inviting as their stores. ―So we decided to make every one of our products available for home use,‖ he said.
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The devices, sold through the company’s website and Amazon, include the AromaCube ($30), a battery-operated diffuser meant for a small space like a bathroom; the AromaPod ($129), designed for up to 500 square feet; and the industrial-strength AromaPro ($849), which comes  

with an HVAC adapter, meaning it can work through a customer’s home heating and airconditioning system. The company’s cold air diffusion process breaks down aroma oils and essential oils — the most popular are white tea and thyme, and oriental garden — and disperses them in the form of dry vapor.
Depending on the device, customers can digitally adjust the intensity of the vapor as well as the hours that it is dispersed. Control of the diffusers via an app is in the planning stages.
―There are people who are buying our machines for aromatherapy,‖ Mr. Gailit said, ―and then there are customers who want to create a certain ambience in their home, like when they’re having a party. They may be having a tropical-themed party or a chocolate fondue party, so they’ll disperse a fragrance like coconut spice or chocolate.‖ Customers have responded, Mr. Gailit said: ―Since we introduced our consumer line, we have significantly increased our business.‖ Mr. Weening said he had had the same experience since Aera hit the market. ―We’re way ahead of where we expected to be with sales,‖ he said. ―People are buying multiple machines.‖
Aroma360’s clients are mostly commercial, ―but a lot of business owners asked for scents in their home as well,‖ said Meghan McMahon, the company’s director of marketing. Residential customers can choose from cold air diffusers that range in price from $149 (for 300 to 800 square feet) to $1,499 (to cover up to 6,000 square feet). ScentAir, too, ventured into the home fragrance market at the urging of commercial customers. But rather than sell directly to the consumer, ScentAir has made its home fragrance system — which is essentially a high-end plug in that costs $130 — available exclusively on the websites of hotel clients like Marriott and Westin.
―It’s a nice tie-in for us,‖ said Edward Burke, ScentAir’s vice president of customer strategy and communications. ―And by offering the home version on the hotels’ websites, it helps us be a better partner.‖
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/02/business/smallbusiness
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Questions:
A Structured Development Process (SDP) is a sequence of steps or stages to conceive design and commercialise a product. Using the case study above explain how these organisations:
1.3 Configured their distribution and marketing activities.   

Answer 1

Solution 1.3

The marketing as well as the distribution strategies of these scent diffusing systems was based on the principle of the appeal that the product rendered on the mindset as well as the senses of the consumers. The items were deliberately set in inn, resort and shopping center anterooms so the customers get pulled in by the aroma and get inquisitive to purchase the item. The home market had become a great source of revenue for these scent diffusing systems. The organizations did not leave a stone unturned to speak to the home group of onlookers. The variety of products offered to appeal the customers as well as increase their usability. The distribution strategy of the company aimed at making the products available at avenues that are quite accessible for all consumers. The different distribution platforms capitalized were drugstores as well as retailers. The principal utilized was to make the items accessible at basic open settings so the customers can get pulled in and their longing to get it tends to be satisfied effortlessly. The ecommerce platform was also capitalized as the coverage of such platforms is quite wide. The pricing of the products was also done, keeping the purchasing power of the consumers in mind.