In recent years our concern for smell has become heightened – helped by smoking bans, and air pollution. It’s perhaps not surprising that we’ve also seen an increasing obsession with managing our own personal impressions, through the use of deodorants, air fresheners, perfumes, car fragrances, clothes sprays, body creams and even flavoured breath mints.
Once considered to be the least important sense, 2004 Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientists, Richard Axel and Linda B. Buck, conclusively proved the power of smell. Since then, products, conversations and aroma possibilities have abounded. But, despite our ability to recall over 10,000 smells, we still have an incredibly stunted vernacular to describe smells without naming the object or cause of the aroma. There is also no agreement, between individual or master perfumers, about what smells good and what doesn’t. Our olfactory values are social, cultural, gender specific, age related and genetically determined.
From the 1980s onwards, we’ve known that crucial factors in purchase decision-making were based upon the emotional and sentimental state. This makes smell a hugely powerful tool for retailers, as this is exactly where smell and memory come into their own. Olfaction is passive, and the experience of odour types can be pervasive and subtle, working at a very different level of cognition. It’s not surprising that brands are increasingly waking up to their powers.
Scratch ‘n’ sniff may seem like something from a time gone by, but the use of scent is the biggest developing trend in sensory marketing and branding today. Fragrance logos which are unique to a product or company are increasingly being used. Diffused when the brand and/or product is present, the limbic part of the brain responds to sensory clues and hard-wires the response in the body-memory.
Odor-styling looks set to diversify and possibly to replace a large percentage of current advertising techniques which are not engaged on a sensory level. Since the advent of digital technologies and cyber worlds, odour biometrics and artificial fragrances are being developed and explored to their full potential.
So, take a deep breath, because you are about to get a scents of things to come. The world of ‘aromanomics’ is about to infiltrate our world; and what is more, we may never know it!
Dr Morgaine Gaye is a Food Futurologist - academic, consultant and presenter, who looks at food and eating from a social, cultural, economic, trend, branding and geo-political perspective.
She will be part of the team leading 'A Day of Good Scents' on November 26. Click here for more details.
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