Smelling Deceit, Concealing Concoctions and Mind Control?

Branding Fragrance & Its Ethics

As in this film, it is ethical to generate a fragrance so aromatic that everyone becomes influenced by it?

Perfume and Fragrance as Marketing

Caribbean citrus, fig, baked bread, Brazilian rosewood, grapefruit or White Tea. Regardless of which one of these exotic fragrances you smell, there is no doubt that many stores, hotels, and products have aromatic fragrances emanating from them. For many businesses, scent and fragrance have become a useful sensory tool in influencing the human mind, often for the purpose of establishing brand image and generating sales. With new advances in odor-producing technology and diffusion mechanisms, and the ability to deconstruct smells and recreate them, perfumers can now virtually engineer any scent (Morgan, 2011; web). This means that businesses and entities can create powerful odors and waft them throughout their stores and products, and ultimately, into the minds of their consumers. This method serves a subliminal marketing and image generating technique, whether it is to entice shoppers to expend cash for a product or to make an experience at a public location more authentic and inviting. 

         With our sense of smell being so omnipresent and involuntary and such a marketing and branding tool technique sweeping through the fragrance and consumer industries, we should consider the ethical implications of scent branding. To highlight the issue, I turn the spotlight to the use of scent to impact emotions, the use of artificial fragrance to encourage buying, and the concealing of the ingredients of a fragrance used within public spaces. 

A Commodity of Emotion?

Hotels like the Venetian and stores like Abercrombie & Fitch inundate the noses of their guests and customers with powerful essences intended to create a certain mood.

  

            In their journal article on ambient scents and consumer reactions, Charles Gules and Peter Bloch discuss recent experiments, where it is discovered that the scent branding practice has been “backed with findings that pleasant scents directly associated with a product increased the favorableness of customer evaluations” (Gules and Bloch, 1995; 88). Compelling scientific evidence exists of the intricate relationship between olfactory experience and the human limbic system, the center orb of memories emotion in the human brain. With such a direct connection between smell and sentiment, it sounds attractive for companies to use this to their advantage.

International Flavors and Fragrances, an international perfume company, recently planned a social experiment in the South Bronx. In the low-income Saint Theresa Apartments, the company hoped to inject the air of the building's hallways and common areas with a pleasant-smelling fragrance, in an attempt to make residents happier (Rovzar, 2010; web).  The scent, called L'Eau Vert du Bronx du Sur (Green Water of the South Bronx), is intended to evoke a feeing of happiness, shining optimism and calmness in the 200 residents who occupy the complex. In a setting of low-income individuals who are perhaps struggling, the perfume can enliven their well-being. However, could it be considered unethical, to manipulate the behavior of unsuspecting people?

          Similar ambient scenting in public spaces has played its role in influencing people’s reactions and reception. At the Venetian and Palazzo Hotels in Las Vegas for example, the guest experience largely transcends the mock Italian architecture. The hotels' signature and recognizable fragrance Arancia (Orange), concocted of white jasmine flowers, roses, Italian mandarin oil, sandlewood, amber and musk, fills the entire chambers of the resort (Cohen, 2011; web). The scent has evoked feelings of sophistication, hominess, freshness and cleanness in resort guests that overall enhances their experience and incentive to stay. I can tell you from personal experience that the aroma of the Venetian is indeed aromatic but far from subtle, as it can be pleasurable smelled in every corner of the resort. Furthermore, hotel guests often seek the aromatic fragrance, which is available for purchase.

In both cases, scent and odor are used as a way to market and influence the emotions of people. Emotion and perception, it seems, are transformed by scent branding into avenues that businesses and companies can exploit and control. By using our emotions through perfumes and artificial smells, attempting to inject a response, and entice us to buy, is this creating a commodity of our emotions? On one side of the discussion, this can be seen as a problem. Deception-detection, the use of machinery to read the minds of people, is banned as a practice in the courts. Scent branding, through its power to control emotions and affect the memories of people, should be, in this respect, seen as unethical as well. However, people have used perfumes and fragrances for years as a way to alter other people's perception of them. For example, a woman can use perfume to hide her natural body odor and to entice a gentleman into pursing her even more. This cultural practice is entirely acceptable. Should fragrance branding be a concern then?

Delicious Trickery

This YouTube video by CBS talks about the use of scent branding by a Brooklyn supermarket in an attempt to boost sales of the products by making shoppers more hungry.

      To explore further, we can look at smells used as a form of "deceit" and making money. Technological advances have allowed for odors to be synthetically and cheaply added to any environment, which can prove highly favorable for stores and companies. This can be in the form of increased sales, customer followings and/or improved reception of the environment. As covered by Time Magazine and as seen in the above video by CBS, Net Cost supermarket in Brooklyn, N.Y. emanates never-ending, aromatic smells of “chocolate, grapefruit, and rosemary focaccia” that greets the nostrils of shoppers. (Sanburn, 2011; web). This smells wonderful. However, the catch is that while this supermarket does stock these products, the strong smells are artificial. The aromas are ventilated throughout the store through specialized scent machines, placed in strategic positions with smells wafting near their respective grocery item. Similarly, the fresh smell of churned chocolate fills the floors of the M&M's store in London. Although this smell is not detected due to the chocolate being packaged in bags, the scent machines in the store solve this problem.

   

Imagine you are in a theme park or bakery. Do the smells of cotton candy and pizza convince you to buy something more than if you did not smell anything? For many stores, scent marketing serves as a way to make customers hungrier and positive, and in turn, more comfortable with opening their wallets. In this way, it seems that they are tricking customers through manipulating their olfactory experience. With smell accounting for 75 percent of what we taste, it makes sense to use scent as a way for making profit.  However, is using fake, artificial smell to goad and dupe customers into buying unethical?

          On the one hand, coercion and mind-controlling people through the control of emotions can be regarded as unethical. If you are trying to take advantage of a person’s intimate, delicate emotions for the sake of generating profit, it should be a controversial act. Especially in the case of the Net Cost supermarket’s management, you know you are intentionally injecting artificial smells to make people buy products. Is this act of “trickery” unacceptable? Is it manipulative? On top of this, is the ambient inundation of stories with fragrances unethical?

         At the same time, the main point of retail is to create a comfortable environment primed for customers to purchase. It is business after all. The customer is shopping, and going to a Christmas store for example with smells of hot chocolate, evergreen trees, and candy canes just makes the experience all the better and inviting. Thus, it should be acceptable for businesses as a marketing tool and tool to make money, their primary practice. Using artificial smell is certainly is not infringing on anyone’s rights, so it cannot be unethical. Marketing is all about creating techniques that sticks a product within the minds of people, whether though sound, sight, or symbols. Scent, then, is just a technique to make a product and space all the more memorable. 

   

Secrecy of Fragrances

          On discussing the ethics of scent branding, Siobhan O’Connor states, “the fragrance industry…trades largely in toxic chemicals that are known allergens and likely hormone disruptors” (O'Connor, 2012; web). The powerful, musky aroma of the Venetian hotel and the enticing, woodsy smell of Abercrombie & Fitch immediately fills your nose as you soon open the doors. As inviting and irresistible as the fragrance is, it is concocted from thousands of chemical ingredients that can individually smell grotesque and undesirable. This blen, however, has the potential to induce allergic reactions in some people and as communicated by the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, the makeup of the blend is is almost always kept hidden from the consumer as a "trade secret".

          If stores like Abercrombie and hotels like the Venetian ventilate such smells throughout their spaces without alerting unsuspecting people who will have serious or uncomfortable reactions, it becomes a problem of ethics. Since fragrance is kept in secrecy within scent branding and the practice is projected upon consumers as they enter stores, should this be a cause for concern? At the same time, if stories give fair warning that their spaces are scented and people with allergies should avoid, they are acting reasonably. Although it is an artificially engineered scent, it is  difficult to take a one-sided approach. Especially if the purpose for a business is to thrive by making an alluring experience for the mass, so affecting a few people should not be a problem.

Ethical Complexities

It is clear that companies are becoming increasingly attuned to the power of scents in influencing the human mind. With its ability to conjure up emotions and recollections, scent can serve as an effective instrument in achieving goals of marketing products and locations, and in creating brand identity. However with such a direct pathway to the innermost chambers of our minds  – the place where we feel and think – it becomes alarming to imagine businesses employing this tactic, often for us to buy their products. The central ethical questions seem to be this: it acceptable to use odors to trigger emotional reactions in unaware, unsuspecting people?

          As discussed earlier, it is difficult to firmly conclude whether scent branding in is ethical, for the issue is not simply a black-and-white matter. There is little scientific evidence to prove that scents, fragrances, and aromas can be used like drugs to control the brains of people. Furthermore, cultural context is always changing. Certain practices can be both acceptable and not. Thus, it is hard to pinpoint the ethical boundaries of scent branding. While odor does indeed exert an effect on us and affect our perception, it is uncertain as to whether it can be a mind control device. Furthermore, businesses market  - it is their job and what they need to do to generate money.  Ultimately, the ethics of scent branding is still open to discussion and serves as a viable topic for further research and consideration. However, we just need to be aware of this sector of marketing the next time we step into a store or a hotel.

Tell us what do you think. Is scent branding and marketing ethical? Or can it be deceptive and sinister?

          

By Tony Huynh

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References:

Gulas, Charles S. and Peter H. Bloch. “Right under Our Noses: Ambient Scent and Consumer Responses”. Journal of Business and Psychology. 10.1 (1995): 87-98. Print.

Morgan, Spencer. “Scent Branding Sweeps the Fragrance Industry”. Businessweek. Bloomberg L.P., 16 June 2010. Web. 6 May 2012.

“The Company Nose Best”. Bloomberg Businessweek. PDF file. <http://images.businessweek.com/mz/10/26/etc_comanynosebest86.pdf>

O’Connor, Siobhan. “Is It Ethical To Scent Public Spaces?” Good. Good Worldwide, LLC, 21 June 2010. Web. 6 May 2012.

Rovzar, Chris. “Scent Company Plans To Perfume Entire South Bronx Low-Income Building To Make It Happy”. New York Mag. New York Media LLC, 17 June 2010. Web. 6 May 2012.

Sanburn, Josh. “NYC Grocery Store Pipes in Artificial Smells”. Moneyland. Time Inc., 20 July 2011. Web. 6 May 2012.

“Smell sells: scent marketing.” The Marketer. Redactive Media Group, 19 Sept. 2011. Web. 6 May 2012.