What the Nose Knows - Avery Gilbert [84]
Once outside the psych lab, the concept of congruency doesn’t offer marketers much traction. Academics know congruency when they see it, but they have a hard time explaining in practical terms how a fragrance matches its marketing theme. Out in the real world, fitting a scent to a commercial context has always been a matter of style, taste, and culture. It’s what perfumers and fragrance evaluators do for a living, and marketers are well advised to join forces with these experts. What marketers need to do is develop clear standards for success. For example, is the point of a scent campaign to encourage people to stay in a store longer, perceive the goods as trendier, or try a new product? Once a program is under way, it would be useful to have a way of measuring its effectiveness: one can imagine standardized measures of scent delivery (the number of noses stimulated) and effectiveness (e.g., increase in brand awareness). In short, marketers need a Nielsen rating for the nostrils.
DEEP IN THE hair-care aisle of a supermarket, a shopper pops the top on a shampoo bottle and takes a sniff. What happens next is a cascade of decision-making: Does it smell too feminine? Is it refreshing, as the packaging claims? Does it smell like an effective antidandruff product? Will my spouse like it? Does it smell classy enough to justify the higher price? All these questions are asked and answered in two sniffs. To the casual observer, the shampoo sniffer is making a snap judgment—nothing more than an emotional reflex of “do I like it?” Yet in that brief moment, fragrance speaks to status (elegant, cheap, old-fashioned), functionality (cleansing, conditioning, therapeutic), and self-identity (feminine, edgy, safe). The scent is full of information, and the consumer is analyzing it. Fragrance speaks to the emotions, but it is more than mood music. It can carry a message to the mind. Once marketers master this sophisticated language, the sense of smell will become a full-fledged advertising medium.
Subliminal Scents
Any marketer who thinks of using smell wants to know how it works, so that he can build a strategy to take advantage of it. Conventional wisdom, slow to acknowledge new research results, still emphasizes emotion as the main psychological mechanism, and thus marketers continue to select scents based on their emotion-inducing qualities. But deciding how strong or weak to set the aroma level is a different issue, one that inevitably leads to questions about the nature of conscious awareness.
No topic in psychology fires the popular imagination as surely as subliminal perception. The mere phrase evokes (subliminally!) technicians in lab coats twiddling dials on a control panel as consumers sleepwalk to the checkout line with armloads of unwanted merchandise. Can a secret scent really turn us into zombie shoppers? Can we be made slaves to smell?
To a psychologist, subliminal has a fairly dry technical definition; it means “below the threshold of conscious awareness.” A subliminal stimulus is too weak to be perceived with certainty, yet strong enough to leave a brief, featherlight impression on the senses. These faint and fleeting perceptions, which elude the direct gaze of our attention, cannot be measured by the traditional methods of rating scales and adjective checklists. Instead, they must be measured by their indirect effects on other mental processes. For example, one can flash “DOG” onto a screen so quickly that a viewer has no time to read it, and can’t even be sure he saw anything. It is pointless to ask him to identify the word. Yet the flashed word causes a flicker of