What the Nose Knows - Avery Gilbert [82]
The Albany mall study whetted the appetite of psychologically inclined marketers. They wanted to know if scent could have more useful, or more profitable, effects on consumers. They wanted scientific evidence that scent could sell, and most of all, they wanted to know how it worked. With few exceptions, like Baron’s study, the scientific exploration of those questions takes place in psychology labs, with college sophomores as stand-ins for regular consumers. In a typical arrangement, students are brought into a room and asked to rate images of products on a computer screen, or to evaluate merchandise in a mocked-up store display. Sometimes the room is scented, sometimes not. Generally, researchers find that scent can change attitudes toward merchandise, but it’s risky to extrapolate from such highly contrived experiments to real-world uses. Research continues, however, and marketers forge ahead, even without the imprimatur of science.
So how does a scent in the air change behavior? From the literature of social psychology, Professor Baron knew that positive events gave rise to small and brief improvements in people’s moods. Something as trivial as finding a coin in a pay phone will do the trick. (The coin finder, for example, is more likely to agree to take part in a boring task a few minutes later.) Baron reasoned that the aroma of coffee and baked goods made people more helpful by lifting their mood. Sure enough, follow-up interviews revealed that shoppers in the scented areas were measurably happier than those in unscented areas.
Baron’s mood hypothesis was easy for marketers to accept because it closely resembled the conventional wisdom that smell was a purely emotional sense. This means that scent marketing is mood marketing; and creating mood is something marketers feel they understand. The equation is simple: nice scent equals good mood equals increased sales. Baron’s explanation also appealed to professional vanity: it cast the spritzer-wielding marketer as a voodoo priest, able to pull the scent-addled public through a store like the iron filings on a Wooly Willy. Mood theory became the rally cry of scent marketers everywhere. The senior PR director for Westin Hotels & Resorts, and the woman behind their White Tea logoscent, subscribes to it. “We wanted to make an emotional connection,” she says.
THE NOTION THAT smell is purely an emotional sense is an old one. In 1924 the chemist and physicist E. E. Free, a former editor of Scientific American, said, “Practically all the reactions to smells are emotional effects on the part of our mind that is called ‘unconscious.’ They are not reasonable, intellectual reactions at all.” Free backed up his claim with a bizarre anecdote about a man who became unaccountably angry whenever he smelled horseradish. Today scientists continue to offer sound bites about the emotional force of smells. The social anthropologist Kate Fox tells the BBC, “Our sense of smell is directly connected to our emotions,” and “Smells trigger very powerful and deep-seated emotional responses.” The German psychologist Bettina Pause says, “Odors seem to be powerful emotional stimuli.” The English psychologist Steve van Toller tells The Independent, “Smells plug straight into our emotional centres in the middle part of the brain—the nonverbal part—and can have a powerful effect on our feelings.” The American psychologist Rachel Herz explains to The Lancet that the nose “has direct access to the amygdala,” the portion of the limbic brain that controls emotional response. Quotes like these set a marketing manager’s hair on fire. Who wouldn’t want to plug their brand straight into the emotional center of the brain?
Alas, things are not that simple. A big challenge to the mood theory of scent marketing is the