An industry that has long used imprinted products to incentivize has a burgeoning new opportunity. Call it in-scent-ivizing.

A minor league baseball team recently released bacon-scented apparel followed by a food maker creating a bacon-scented alarm clock. It brought to the forefront a sensible tool that just begs to be further tapped by the promotional products industry:

What if promotional products routinely could be imprinted not just with a logo but with a fragrance?

Scented promotional products already exist in the form of candles and lip balms. Scentco Promo, to name one distributor, takes it further, making scented writing instruments and stuffed animals.

But the new bacon-scented products are bringing fragrances where fragrances usually haven’t gone before.

The Lehigh Valley IronPigs reported surging sales across the country soon after the team unveiled its scented T-shirts and hats. A little later, to sizable internet buzz, Oscar Mayer announced a cellphone app and plug-in device that produce the smell of bacon when the alarm clock goes off.

Is it hard to imagine a refrigerator magnet with a breakfast nook’s logo and the scent of pancakes? A paperweight with a florist’s logo and a rose’s smell? A beach chair that touts a boardwalk destination and smells like salt-water taffy?

Considering the strong association between fragrance and memory, smell-to-sell advertising would stand to improve what PPAI Promotional Products Work says is already a 76 percent brand recall rate generated by promotional products.

And with technological advances promising to make fragrance advertising even more prevalent, inscentivizing carries the smell of success.

Thinking of a promotional product that would be ideal with a fragrance? Share with a Tweet @essentcorp using hashtag #inSCENTivize.