Bangkok, 2014.
Hotels were becoming more beautiful. Shopping centres more sophisticated. Restaurants, spas, residences and showrooms were investing heavily in architecture, lighting, music and interior design.
Every detail was being considered.
Almost every detail.
One part of the experience was still being left to chance.
What the place smelled like.
Who Is Jansep Ejercito?
Jansep Ejercito is the Founder and CEO of Scent Up Aroma Marketing, the scent marketing company he established in Bangkok, Thailand, in 2014. Today Scent Up designs signature scents and commercial scenting programs for hotels, retail, casinos, offices and other businesses in Thailand, the Philippines and Malaysia, with locations in Bangkok, Cebu City and Kuala Lumpur.
He built the company on a single belief: that fragrance deserves a place alongside architecture, visual identity, music and service as a deliberately designed part of the customer experience.
And on a single question.
The Question That Started Scent Up
It began with something most people experience without noticing.
You walk into a place you have not visited for years. You smell something familiar. And suddenly you remember exactly how that place made you feel.
A hotel.
A childhood home.
A journey.
A person.
A moment.
Scent has that power. Jansep was not thinking about perfume, or about air fresheners. He was thinking about memory.
And he began asking the question that would become the foundation of Scent Up:
If scent can make us remember a moment, why can't it help us remember a brand?
That question started everything.
Building Something No One Could See
Starting a scent marketing company in Thailand was not the obvious business to build.
There was no product to point at. No LED screen. No signboard. No new furniture in the middle of a lobby.
The product was almost invisible. You could not see it. You could not touch it.
So Jansep was not simply asking companies to buy fragrance. He was asking them to rethink what a brand actually is.
A brand, he believed, is more than a logo. More than a colour palette, a typeface or an advertising campaign.
A brand is the total feeling someone carries with them after an experience.
And scent can become part of that feeling.
So in 2014, Scent Up Aroma Marketing was born in Bangkok, with a simple ambition: to help businesses design the part of their customer experience that people can smell, feel and remember.
"We Already Have an Air Freshener"
Building the company meant educating the market, again and again. The same question kept coming back:
"Why do we need scent marketing? We already have an air freshener."
That question showed exactly why Scent Up needed to exist.
Jansep never believed scent marketing should mean making a room smell pleasant.
A beautiful fragrance without strategy is still just fragrance.
A scent machine without an understanding of airflow is still just a machine.
An expensive perfume in the wrong environment will never become a brand identity.
So before asking "Which fragrance do you like?", Scent Up asks different questions:
Who are you as a brand?
Who are your customers?
How should they feel when they walk in?
What should they remember when they leave?
And finally, the question that became the heart of the Scent Up philosophy:
What should your brand smell like?
The Invisible Logo
Jansep describes a signature scent in one line:
It is the invisible logo of a brand.
You see a logo. You hear a piece of music. But you experience a scent.
Unlike a logo on a wall, scent surrounds a person completely. It becomes part of the room, part of the atmosphere, part of the memory.
That changed the brief for every project.
Not "make this hotel smell nice", but "create an arrival experience people associate with this hotel."
Not "put fragrance in this showroom", but "what should someone feel the first time they encounter this brand?"
The difference looks small. It is the whole philosophy.
The fragrance should never be the hero. The brand should be the hero. Scent is there to make the brand stronger.
Part Branding, Part Environmental Design, Part Engineering
Over time, Jansep learned that creating the fragrance is only half the work. Making it behave properly inside a real commercial space is another discipline entirely.
A scent that works beautifully in a small showroom can disappear in a hotel lobby. A system that works in an office can perform completely differently in a shopping centre.
Ceiling height matters. Air-conditioning matters. Foot traffic, doors opening and closing, humidity, operating hours, the placement of the system, even the direction of the air: all of it matters.
That realisation shaped what Scent Up became. Not a fragrance supplier. Not an equipment company. A scent marketing partner that brings together:
Strategy. Fragrance. Technology. Installation. Management.
Today Scent Up covers the complete scent journey: understanding the brand, defining a scent direction, developing or selecting a signature fragrance, studying the environment, choosing commercial diffusion technology or HVAC scenting, installing it, and managing fragrance replenishment and the system over time.
"Anyone Can Sell a Machine"
Years inside real commercial environments taught the lessons that now define the company.
There are projects where more fragrance is not the answer.
There are spaces where a smaller system, positioned correctly, outperforms a larger one.
There are fragrances that smell extraordinary in a bottle but do not belong inside a particular brand.
And there are times when the right advice is not the one that sells the most equipment.
"I never wanted Scent Up to become just another company selling fragrance oils and scent machines. Anyone can sell a machine. What matters is understanding the brand, understanding the space and understanding what people should feel when they walk through the door."
— Jansep Ejercito, Founder & CEO
For Jansep, the measure of scent marketing is not how strongly customers notice a fragrance.
It is what remains after they leave.
From Bangkok to Southeast Asia
What began in Bangkok grew space by space. Hotels and resorts. Retail. Corporate offices. Real estate sales galleries. Automotive showrooms, wellness spaces and entertainment venues, each with its own expectations and its own lessons.
Scent Up kept learning how fragrance behaves not in a laboratory, but in the places where businesses actually meet their customers.
Eventually the work crossed borders. From its Bangkok foundation, Scent Up built regional capability serving businesses in Thailand, the Philippines and Malaysia.
That growth was built with family. Jansep's younger brother, Jovani Ejercito, is COO of Scent Up Thailand and Co-Founder of Scent Up Philippines, turning the vision into operations that work in every market.
What started as a Bangkok scent marketing company became a Southeast Asian sensory branding business.
The central idea never changed:
Design the experience first. Then design the scent.
Why Memory Still Matters
More than a decade after Scent Up began, Jansep still believes the industry is about one thing.
Not machines. Not perfume oils. Not specifications.
Memory.
Technology will keep changing. Diffusion systems will get smarter, controls more precise, fragrance development more advanced. But people will still walk into spaces and feel something. They will still connect places with emotions.
Advertising fights to be seen. Social media fights to be clicked. Marketing fights to be heard.
Scent works differently. It needs no screen and no headline. It quietly becomes part of the environment, and when it is done well, customers may not even notice what changed.
They simply feel: this place is different.
The Future Is Multisensory
People are surrounded by screens, and brands compete every second for visual attention.
That is exactly why physical experiences are becoming more valuable. They cannot be downloaded. You have to be there. You have to walk through the door.
Jansep believes the strongest physical brands will think beyond what customers see, to what they hear, what they touch, what they feel, and what they smell.
Scent Up intends to be part of that next chapter.
From Bangkok to Southeast Asia. From scent machines to complete scent strategies. From fragrance to identity. From atmosphere to memory.
Because People Don't Always Remember What They Saw
They may forget the furniture.
They may forget the lighting.
They may forget the advertisement that brought them there.
But sometimes, years later, they encounter a familiar fragrance, and the memory returns.
The place. The experience. The feeling.
The brand.
That is why Scent Up exists. That is why Jansep Ejercito started the journey. And that is the idea Scent Up keeps building today.