Olfactory Description

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  eBook - ePub

  Sensory Marketing

  Research on the Sensuality of Products

  • Aradhna Krishna(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Hedberg and Brown (2002) showed that in a classroom setting with students from different cultures, educators needed to develop Web site interfaces that matched with the students’ cultures in order to maximize their learning process.

  Smell, however, is unique because olfactory responses are generally autonomic, meaning that it influences humans physiologically before actually influencing cognition. In general, little, if any, cognitive effort is required to experience scents (Ehrlichman & Bastone, 1992 ), and scents result in emotionally laden memory associations when recalled. Although research in olfaction has emerged extensively in areas like services and retailing (e.g., Chebat & Michon, 2003 ), few researchers have looked at how cultures shape perceptions through scents. We therefore address this gap in this chapter by exploring how people from different cultures associate scents with emotions and meanings.

  Literature Review

  The Emotional Role of Olfaction

  Humans are exposed to many kinds of scents every day from which individual human responses are formed. Consumers prefer certain perfumes, room fragrances for the home, or choose to patronize certain service outlets because of the preferred ambient scent. Many of our olfactory preferences are based purely on emotional associations (Fox, 2008 ). Meaning, how humans feel about a particular scent, depends on how they relate the scent with certain emotions. This primarily has to do with the scent linkages within the limbic system of the brain. When coming into contact with smells, these scents act as inducing agents that stimulate these connections. The limbic system has a role in processing and expressing emotions. Of all the five senses, scent is most closely linked to emotion rather than “facts” (Herz & Cupchik, 1992

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