CHAPTER 9

Zombies at the Mall

All around the world people and companies are becoming aware of the power of scent.

—MARTIN LINDSTROM, Brand Sense

NASAL PERSUASION IS HAPPENING EVERYWHERE. A scent generator hidden in a ventilation duct, or parked discreetly in the corner, can amplify the natural scent of a store’s merchandise: high-end shirtmaker Thomas Pink plays freshly laundered linen, while the Hershey’s outlet in Times Square vents extra chocolate into the air. Some merchants get creative, like the furniture store in Massachusetts that filled its children’s section with a bubble-gum scent. Even brands with no inherent scent get in on the act: consumer electronics giant Samsung wafts a corporate logoscent into its flagship store on Columbus Circle, and Westin Hotels uses a signature “White Tea” composition in the lobby. In each case, by providing a more engaging retail experience, the company hopes to benefit in terms of sales, consumer satisfaction, and brand image.

Are we on the brink of a new era in advertising? Marketing wunderkind Martin Lindstrom believes so. In his recent book Brand Sense, extolling the future of multisensory branding, Lindstrom is extra-super-excited about scent—he sees it as the next huge trend in marketing. Whether or not scent becomes an integral part of branding, Lindstrom’s enthusiastic prediction is the latest in a long history of marketing to the nose.

In 1925, for example, a headline in New York’s Daily News Record read “Sense of Smell—An Important Factor in All Modern Merchandising.” In 1934 Forbes told its readers, “‘Sell by Smell’ may be the next big slogan in marketing.” In 1939 The Management Review said, “The odor engineer is joining the color engineer as a consultant to the sales manager.” In 1947 The Saturday Evening Post warned that “Shrewd merchandisers have charted a new route to your pocketbook. Now, shoe polish smells like roses, ink is perfumed, imitation leather has the scent of pigskin.”

Today’s merchandisers continue to experiment, with such offerings as lavender-scented automobile tires (aimed at women) and high-end bowling balls redolent of orange-ginger. The real action, however, lies in projecting olfactory character into indoor commercial spaces. This application has been fully embraced in one large business sector: the gaming industry. Las Vegas is the trend’s epicenter; half the major properties on the Strip have scent systems. The MGM Grand has deployed as many as nine scents simultaneously around its property, and the Venetian features a corporate logoscent called “Seduction.” In their quest to fine-tune consumer experience, casinos have made sensory engineering a priority. Guest rooms are kept chilly to discourage visitors from spending too much time in them. Complex floor plans channel patrons farther into the gaming areas, where clocks are banished, along with views of the outside world. In seeking new ways to keep people playing longer, casinos have taken the lead in manipulating the commercial smellscape.

A negative example—the removal of a brand’s characteristic smell—reveals the importance of the olfactory dimension. As the Starbucks Coffee chain expanded, it decided to switch from open containers and store-ground coffee to flavor-locked packaging. Its goal was to ensure the freshness of its roasted beans and to make life easier for the java-jockeys. But the vacuum-sealed packaging came with an unanticipated cost: it made the shops aromatically sterile. Without a coffee-heavy atmosphere to entice them, customers were being poached by the competition. Starbucks lost what company founder Howard Schultz calls “perhaps the most powerful nonverbal signal we had.” To get it back, the chain is considering a return to scooping and grinding actual beans.

Businesses can be confronted with olfactory issues by a sudden change in public policy. When smoking in pubs and clubs was recently banned in Scotland and Wales, owners were shocked to discover how bad their establishments smelled. Once the smoke cleared, Luminar, a company that owns a chain of British nightclubs, found that “the stench of beer and sweat was no longer masked by smoke.” The company began a frantic search for ways to mask the unpleasant new reality. The proposed remedy—blowing rose scent over a mass of sweaty, burping bodies—doesn’t sound promising, but here’s hoping they find an effective solution. Fraternity houses across America will be paying attention.

 

A DECADE AGO, the social psychologist Robert Baron cased a shopping mall near Albany, New York, mapping out odorless areas as well as spots that had a naturally pleasant scent—the latter turned out to be near Mrs. Field’s Cookies, the Cinnabon store, and The Coffee Beanery. Next, Baron sent in accomplices who approached shoppers and “accidentally” dropped a pen or asked for change for a dollar. Baron recorded one simple response: Did the shopper help the stranger or not? Helping behavior—picking up the pen or making change—was significantly higher in pleasantly scented areas than in unscented ones. Baron’s experiment was the first to examine the effects of odor outside the lab and in a natural consumer ecosystem—the mall. Its result was clear: shoppers respond to ambient scent in measurable and meaningful ways. The familiar scents of daily life may not call attention to themselves, yet they exert subtle behavioral effects on those who inhale. Did Cinnabon set out to make mall patrons more helpful? Unlikely, but it turns out helpfulness is just a side-benefit of public bun baking.

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 “congruency” problem. Studies repeatedly find that for a scent to be effective, it must match its commercial context. A mismatch produces no benefit, and may even leave consumers with an unfavorable impression of a store or brand. For example, one experiment used two equally pleasant fragrances: Lily of the Valley and Sea Mist. One or the other was in the air as female college students were shown a display of satin sleepwear for women. The students said they were more likely to purchase the clothes, and were willing to pay more for them, when Lily of the Valley was in the air. In separate testing, Lily of the Valley was rated as a better match to the clothes. While Sea Mist was equally pleasant, it lacked the feminine associations and bedroom ambience of Lily of the Valley. So much for nice scent equals good mood equals increased sales—people pay attention to the meaning of smells.

The congruency problem popped up again when researchers examined the combined effects of ambient music and scent in an actual gift store. They played tunes that were either relaxing or energizing, and used scents with either high or low arousal value. When low-arousal lavender was paired with relaxing tunes, the result was a significant increase in consumer satisfaction and impulse purchasing, and a higher interest in exploring the store and making a return visit. The same happened when high-arousal grapefruit was paired with energizing tunes. Yet the same tunes and smells, when mismatched for energy level, had no effect on consumer behavior. In another study, photos of a store decorated for a holiday sale got favorable ratings when shown with a Christmas-themed fragrance and Christmas-themed tunes. The photos got lower ratings when the Christmas scent was paired with nonholiday music. The overall lesson is clear: for smell to be effective in marketing, context matters, because people try to intellectually reconcile what they see with what they smell.

The market is already addressing the need for multisensory coordination. Retailers who don’t have the time or skill to invent their own blends of scent and sound can select from prepackaged combinations. Muzak LLC, the company that supplies background music for stores and offices, has teamed up with Scent-Air Technologies, Inc., an outfit that installs aroma equipment in retail stores. Together they offer custom-designed scent-and-sound combinations that “enhance the retail experience.” Scent-Air’s CEO told newspapers, “We’re Muzak for your nose.”

Recently, the University of Washington business professor Eric Spangenberg and his colleagues gave marketers just the kind of study they’d been yearning for: one that measured the effect of scent in dollars and cents. Spangenberg’s team used an actual off-campus clothing store, where half the floor space was devoted to men’s clothing and the other half to women’s. Over the course of two weeks the store was alternately scented with two fragrances of similar strength and pleasantness: a feminine vanilla and a masculine rose maroc (a spicy, honeylike note). When vanilla was in the air, women’s-wear sales increased and menswear sales declined. When rose maroc was used, the sales changes were reversed. In other words, men bought more when the scent was male-appropriate, and less when it was feminine; the reverse was true for women. The effect was substantial. People shopping under gender-appropriate scent bought an average of 1.7 items and spent $55.14; people shopping with the gender-inappropriate scent bought only 0.9 items and spent $23.01.

Call it congruence or call it context—the important point is that the judgments affected by scent involve comparison and evaluation, not just an emotional gut-check on the part of the consumer. The shopper who perceives a mismatch between a store’s scent and its goods or music is using reasoning, not feelings. The narrow focus on emotion is beginning to give way as more researchers find that consumers process smell information cognitively. Marketing experts are beginning to give people credit for thinking. The Canadian researchers Jean-Charles Chebet and Richard Michon, for example, believe that emotion has been overemphasized as an explanation. They manipulated the scent of a mall near Montreal and found that mood had relatively little impact on how much shoppers bought. Chebet and Michon contend that scent instead changes how shoppers think about the appearance of the mall and the quality of its merchandise. In other words, what counts is meaning more than mood.

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 measurable brain-wave activity, and its lingering trace will be evident in subsequent word-association tests.

It is a deeply held belief of marketers that scented advertising works subliminally. For example, according to Sue Brush, senior vice president of Westin Hotels & Resorts, the chain’s White Tea fragrance is “one of those subliminal things you don’t necessarily advertise, but we hope it can help guests decompress after the rigors of the road.” Enthusiasts and detractors both believe that scent marketing is a form of mind control that operates in the murky zone of the subliminal, where a well-placed whisper is all that’s required to set off psychological chain reaction resulting, inevitably, in an opening of the consumer’s wallet.

 

ACCORDING TO THE PSYCHOLOGIST Anthony Pratkanis, popular enthusiasm for the subliminal has come in waves. The first arrived in 1957, when James Vicary claimed to have shown subliminal ads in a movie theater. Vicary said his messages—“eat popcorn” and “drink Coca-Cola”—boosted Coke sales in the lobby by 18.1 percent and popcorn sales by 57.7 percent. In the Cold War era preoccupied with the brainwashing of soldiers and secret agents, Vicary’s claim generated enormous media coverage. Yet Vicary couldn’t or wouldn’t produce his data. Nor would he show anyone the tachistoscope he allegedly used to flash the ads onto the movie screen. He eventually admitted to Advertising Age that he fabricated the study to draw attention to his consulting business.

A second subliminal wave began in 1973, when Wilson B. Key published Subliminal Seduction, in which he claimed that sexually arousing images were hidden in printed advertisements. (This led to a brief fad at parties in the mid-1970s, where people squinted at whiskey ads in Esquire, looking for a sex orgy in the ice cube.) The original studies cited by Key were flimsy and lacked critical control groups. Though his theories were roundly dismissed by psychologists, Key—now an elderly man—continues to see penises embedded in advertising images wherever he looks.

The third and most recent wave of the subliminal fad came in the late 1980s and early 1990s with self-help audio tapes that promised everything from weight reduction to increased self-esteem. Driven partly by late-night infomercials, subliminal tapes became a $50-million industry, even though little or no scientific evidence existed that they worked as claimed.

It’s clear that we can absorb visual and auditory information without being consciously aware of it. Whether these fleeting perceptions affect our behavior as directly and purposefully as subliminal-advertising proponents claim is another story. Anthony Pratkanis finds no evidence that they do. I believe the same holds true for smell. There is, for example, solid evidence for subliminal odor perception. The German researcher Thomas Hummel snaked a millimeter-wide tube about three inches up the noses of volunteers. (Actually, he let them do it themselves—it’s less stressful.) The tube delivered a constant stream of warmed and humidified air, along with occasional pulses of odor, directly to the sensory surface of the nose. A wire inside the tube monitored electrical activity from the same surface. Scents too weak to be consciously detected nevertheless provoked a response in the sensory cells of the nose. Using different techniques, other researchers have observed the brain responding to scent at levels too low for the test subject to reliably detect. There is little question that odors can be registered subconsciously in the nose and the brain.

Psychologists in the Netherlands took techniques used to measure the indirect effects of subliminal sights and sounds and applied them to olfaction. They gave people an incidental exposure to the citrus scent of a familiar all-purpose cleanser. Most participants were unaware of the smell and of the purpose of the experiment. Yet those who inhaled the scent were faster at picking out cleaning-related words from a list, and were more likely to mention cleaning-related behaviors when asked to describe their routine daily activities. Given a crumbly cracker to eat, people who’d been exposed to the cleanser scent engaged in more crumb-sweeping and other tidying behavior than people who hadn’t been exposed. The subliminal scent activated a mental network of cleaning-related associations, later expressed through word and deed, but not in a readily exploitable way. People didn’t spontaneously mention brand names or rush out to buy a bottle of cleanser. Enhanced crumb-brushing is hardly the stuff of mind control.

That the nose and brain respond to subliminal smells under ultraprecise laboratory conditions is not surprising, but are the effects robust enough to make a difference in the real world? The classic demonstration of covert selling power dates back to 1932. Donald Laird had male students at Colgate University pose as market researchers and go door-to-door in Utica, New York. The young men presented housewives with four samples of identical silk stockings and asked them point to their favorite pair. The stockings varied only in smell: the unadorned product had a slightly rancid character; the others were lightly scented with either narcissus, a fruity note, or a sachet fragrance. Laird’s team completed 250 interviews before one suspicious lady called the cops, and when the police report made the local newspapers, the study’s cover was blown. Of the 250 women, only six were aware that the stockings were scented. Despite this, there was a clear influence of scent on stocking preference: 50 percent of the women chose the narcissus-scented pair, 24 percent chose the fruity pair, 18 percent chose the sachet scent, and the natural hose were selected by only 8 percent.

Smell alters our behavior in daily life, in the trivial sense that a whiff near lunchtime may steer us toward a burrito instead of a pizza. The subliminality of the message—whether I smell a pizza before I have a conscious desire to buy one—is of no more consequence than whether I heard a pizza ad on my commute that morning. In either case, the compulsion—or lack thereof—is about the same.

Still, subliminal advertising continues to frighten people who should know better. The European Chemoreception Research Organization, a society of smell and taste researchers, recently editorialized about a study done by some of its members, in which smells were presented along with odor-evocative words. The results: people found a cheesy aroma less unpleasant when it was paired with the phrase “cheddar cheese” than when it was paired with “body odor.” The power of suggestion was so strong that people reported that even clean air smelled bad when labeled “body odor.” This entirely predictable outcome was enough for ECRO to raise an alarm: “Unfortunately this fact offers powerful tools for manipulating the information and directing the choice of consumers towards particular foods, perfumes, [and] detergents,” a possibility that, “disturbingly,” could lead to “misleading messages.” Shocker! Ads seek to manipulate consumer choice. EU bureaucrats will have a field day drafting regulations banning smell fraud in advertising.

Contrary to popular belief, the Federal Communications Commission has no formal rules about subliminal advertising, smelly or otherwise. In fact, the FCC has investigated only one complaint about subliminal messages. In 1987 it found that Dallas radio station KMEZ-FM broadcast a program containing them. Which dastardly corporation was responsible for this outrage? Well…none, actually. The subliminals were hidden in an antismoking program aired on behalf of the American Cancer Society.

The idea of subliminal advertising continues to haunt the field. Merchants who use ambient scent are reluctant to talk about it because they don’t want the public to view them as zombie masters. They could defuse the issue by debunking the power of subliminals, but they don’t—perhaps because they too believe in it, if only a little bit. Subliminal perception is now something experts debate as they recommend fragrance levels for their retail clients. Michelle Harper, director of fragrance development at Ayrlessence, says, “You want it to be subliminal, especially in an environmental space.” On the other hand, Joe Faranda, chief marketing officer for International Flavors & Fragrances, says, “The scent no longer has to be working subliminally to be effective.” Who to believe? In my experience, when a scent calls attention to itself, people feel obliged to decide whether or not they like it. At that point they’re focused on the scent and not the store. Samsung’s corporate logoscent—suggestive of green melon—works because it is barely detectable; any stronger and customers would start looking for the fruit salad bar. There’s a difference between subtle and subliminal.

Rage Against the Machine

When the English perfumer Eugene Rimmel created the first mass-marketed perfumes in the mid-1800s, he also invented various ways of promoting them through scented print advertising. He gave away scented almanacs and scented fans. He placed scented ads in London theatre programs. These efforts were not met with universal applause. His sophisticated contemporaries turned up their noses at the theatre programs; these aromatic momentos of “rank commercialism” were seen as intrusive, crass, and annoying. The equivalent in our time are scented perfume ads in magazines. Calvin Trillin has inveighed against the ones he found in Vanity Fair; they “revived old thoughts about whether the Drafters could have envisioned the possibility that the freedom of expression guaranteed in the First Amendment would someday extend to smelling up the place.”

The scented ads that offend Mr. Trillin are the legacy of Fred and Gale Hayman, the California entrepreneurs who started the Giorgio of Beverly Hills boutique on Rodeo Drive. In 1982 they launched a marketing campaign for a perfume named after their store. They began by mailing perfume-soaked blotters to their local clients, but to get samples under noses on a national scale they needed a cheaper method. Their ad for Giorgio, in the May 1983 Vogue, was the first ever to use the ScentStrip Sampler, a new product from Arcade Marketing. This was the now-familiar printed page with a glued-down flap; as the flap is pulled open, microdroplets of fragrance oil in the glue are ruptured and scent is released. Readers complained that the magazine reeked of Giorgio, but sales boomed and the magazine industry never looked back. (Determined to reach even more nostrils, the Haymans unleashed the Spritzer Ladies from Hell, teams of white-and-yellow-jacketed reps who aggressively misted millions of people in department stores.) The Giorgio perfume, formulated with an extraordinarily high ratio of fragrance oil to alcohol, was brassy, penetrating, and easily recognized. Fancy restaurants banned it, and wearers caused near-riots in elevators across the country. Giorgio-bashing became a snob sport. Outside of Le Cirque and the refined precincts of Manhattan’s Upper East Side, however, the perfume was a blockbuster.

Scented print ads are enjoying a new renaissance at the moment. Fox-Walden Films recently paid $110,000 to run a scented full-page movie ad in the Los Angeles Times. The Wall Street Journal and USA Today are said to be considering rub-and-smell ads. Each year the annual report of spice maker McCormick & Company features a different aroma; in 2006 a disappointingly thin nutmeg rendition struggled to be noticed above the stink of the ink. A cover of the German scientific journal Angewandte Chemie smelled like lily of the valley, in order to draw attention to an article on odor receptors. The core market for scented ads has always been women’s fashion magazines; the publisher of Allure claims that 85 percent of her readers immediately try the scent strips in her book.

Among some social critics, scented ads inspire violent imagery; words like “assault” and “bombardment” get thrown around. To the journalist Emma Cook, consumers are helpless victims: “Whereas you can exercise the choice to stop listening or watching, physically you can’t help smelling things.” Artificial scents put A. S. Byatt, the English novelist, into a foul mood: “I think we are bringing up a generation…desensitised by constant loud and garish smells.” If man-made scents were sounds, “they would be a cacophony.” Byatt is a formidable intellectual who has deconstructed the writings of Wordsworth and Coleridge and lectured on American literature at University College London. How does she account for the inexplicable desire of the masses for scented products? She blames advertising.

“The television screen shows branches and violets. It shows pine forests and sheets of falling white water ending in curls of clean, shining spray. It shows meadows full of buttercups and pine forests full of mystery and crisp needles. It is telling you—enticing you—to re-create these atmospheres in your own home with air fresheners, with aerosol sprays of scented furniture polish, with…” You get the drift.

Byatt objects on ethical grounds: “The smells that have invaded our modern lives are neither the good smells nor the bad smells, but the guilty, masking smells. Smells that we use to cover human smells.” Apparently perfumes are deceitful because they hide our true primate stinkiness.

Unsurprisingly, Byatt’s fiction is riddled with morbid smells. Here’s a typical example: “It was not a clean train—the upholstery of their carriage had the dank smell of unwashed trousers.” Elsewhere she describes a husband’s “evil-smelling breath full of brandy and stale smoke.” Occasionally she outdoes herself: “It was a liquid smell of putrefaction, the smell of maggoty things at the bottom of untended dustbins, the smell of blocked drains, and unwashed trousers, mixed with the smell of bad eggs, and of rotten carpets and ancient polluted bedding.” Her preoccupation with unwashed trousers gives the impression of a nose tuned to the Dark Side. She recoils from perfume like the Wicked Witch from the fire bucket. Hide the Giorgio or she’ll send the flying monkeys after you.

Perhaps an elderly British novelist is entitled to get cranky about perfume, but why should a thirtysomething Internet columnist lose it over an air freshener? That’s what happened when Mark Morford, of the San Francisco Chronicle’s SFGate.com website, teed off on Procter & Gamble’s ScentStories aroma player:

What vile marketing decision was made, and by whom, that said we must now progress from static mute little tabletop chemical-bomb air fresheners to more sinister, electronically activated Glade plug-in thingies with silly little built-in fans to full-fledged toaster-size appliances that require huge amounts of plastic and massive marketing campaigns and full AC power and interchangeable chemical-soaked disks?

It’s not just the ever-grander technology that makes Morford hot under the collar—it’s the implied message contained in the aroma:

This is the marketing strategy: each disc is apparently designed to somehow lift you out of your sanitized tract-home suburban kids-’n’-dogs-’n’-minivans dystopia and transport you straight to the Misty Mountains or the sultry Bahamas or the Brazilian rain forest or whatever.

What unhinges Morford and others like him isn’t a particular smell, it’s the marketing of smell. Consumerism, mass consumption, and the excesses of the free market as embodied by a scent-delivery contraption really put his nose out of joint.

The psychoanalysts G. G. Wayne and A. A. Clinco offered a related criticism in 1959: “What was once a vital instrument for survival—directing and warning primitive man—has now deteriorated to an instrument for irrelevant and obtuse titillation through the double-jointed vocabulary of advertising.” Emma Cook makes a similar claim: “Until recently, appealing to our sense of smell was relatively virgin territory for marketeers and manufacturers.” (Cook missed the fact that her countryman Eugene Rimmel was marketing up a scented storm in the 1860s.) Common to all these critics is the notion that things were better in the good old days. They long for the unscented state of nature that existed before air fresheners, television, and perfume. Their olfactory Eden ended the moment one cavewoman asked another, “What are you wearing?” and traded a mastodon steak for a handful of aromatic resin. The fact is that millions of people enjoy giving their homes a pleasant scent, and, as in other areas of everyday life, they are willing to pay for convenience and a modest amount of fantasy.

I had a close encounter with anticapitalist scent-bashing a few years ago, when I was among a group of experts invited by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington to help the National Museum of Natural History plan a large traveling exhibit on the science and history of smell. Along with curators, exhibit designers, and high-ranking staff members, we spent the day in the museum’s dark-paneled boardroom that looks out on Constitution Avenue and the IRS building. It was a typical institutional brainstorming session, with lots of cringe-inducing “exercises” meant to sharpen our creativity. One of these involved free association with pictures clipped from magazines. We took turns arranging them in domino fashion on the floor and afterward tried to interpret the pattern. The group decided the pictures fell into two categories: “human” and “environment.” (I was puzzled; aren’t humans part of the environment?) Then a senior curator reached down and removed an Estée Lauder soap ad from the arrangement; she felt it didn’t belong to either category. I grew more puzzled.

For the next exercise, we broke into working groups. The soapsnatcher and I were assigned to the same group. Our task was to think of exhibit topics that would interest teenage visitors. With no prompting, she launched into a heated speech: the exhibit should make teens aware of how companies use smell to influence them. Others in the group gently challenged her, but she wouldn’t relent. Her mission was to alert teens to the sinister corporate conspiracy behind fragrance advertising. I pointed out that subliminal advertising was largely a crock, but still she wouldn’t let go. She was determined to stop America’s youth from being turned into scent-controlled mall zombies. Finally, I reminded her that the Smithsonian was planning to fund the show with donations from corporate sponsors, and that these folks might be reluctant to fork over three million dollars for the privilege of having their business smeared.

The Smithsonian never did get around to doing a smell exhibition.

 

FOR EVERY ANTAGONIST of scent marketing there are a dozen crazily optimistic Martin Lindstroms preaching the benefits of sensory branding and experimenting with new ways of appealing to consumers through the nose. It’s true that scent marketing has been promoted many times by futurologists of the past—it’s a field whose promise has yet to be fulfilled. But the same can be said of Internet advertising or other new frontiers. The strategies of scent marketing are still evolving, but its technology has matured rapidly. All sorts of scent-delivery devices are available today, ranging from industrial-scale diffusers that cover an entire Wal-Mart to point-of-sale displays that blow a scented kiss at individual customers. There are passively activated devices that spritz as you walk past, and interactive kiosks that immerse you in a multisensory audio-visual-olfactory experience. Marketers will soon learn the best ways to put this hardware to use.

There is another reason to believe the field has a bright future. We are now raising a generation of scent-centric young consumers. Unilever’s Axe body spray is a major hit: walk past any high school and smell for yourself. Aromatherapy has evolved from a quasiclinical folk practice to mainstream product positioning; no college dorm room is complete without an array of scented candles. Students use them for studying, for chilling, and for, well, you know. So scent-aware is this generation that Procter & Gamble’s Febreze odor eliminator is equally popular—and often seen in the same dorm rooms. These are the consumers who will put scent marketing on the map.