Do You Have an Olfactory Portfolio?

Our creative director has a coffee maker at his desk and when I walked by it yesterday I thought it smelled really good. "You know," I said, "Americans associate coffee with 'home.' That's why realtor's put on a pot of coffee when they're having an open house. When people walk in, they feel like they're home." He asked me to leave his cubicle.

I learned about the association between "coffee" and "home" from a New York Times article I read seven years ago entitled, "Does the Smell of Coffee Brewing Remind You of Your Mother?." The article discusses the work of Clotaire Rapaille, a medical anthropologist who uses Jungian-style "archetype research" to uncover the unconscious associations that people have with various products and cultural phenomena (he has written several books about it, including The Cultural Code: An Ingenious Way to Understand Why People Around the World Live and Buy as They Do).

There are at least two lessons for marketers and designers to learn here. One has to do with smell and, in fact, the folks at Adverlab just yesterday wrote about Motorola's patent for a Smell-o-phone. That post has a list of other smell-related advertising news that is definitely worth checking out. The folks at a related site, Futurelab, also recently published a post on ads that target customer noses, which says that one chain of gas stations in California is spreading "the aroma of coffee near the pumps to encourage consumers to fill up their travel mug in addition to their gas tank." (Thanks to Erik Hauser of the Experiential Marketing Forum for that last tip.)

The other lesson is that the associations people have with products and brands are not necessarily conscious and that traditional surveys and focus groups may not be the most effective way to figure out exactly what those associations are. Who knew, as Dr. Rapaille discovered, that the key association that Americans have with the presidency is not "fatherhood" or "leadership" or even "nationalism," but, "cheap entertainment."

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