Surprise Surprise

It's a problem for many a fragrance-wearer – you trial and trial vial by vial until you find that one scent that is totally you. It smells great in the beginning, the middle, and at the distant end of the day. You even get compliments when you wear it.

But then, this cruel phenomenon of odor detection takes over. It's called nose fatigue, and the way it works is that the more you smell something, the less you smell it. It's the reason Febreeze didn't work in its first instantiation as a deodorizer (people can't smell when their own house needs deodorizing) and it's the reason people tend to bath themselves in their own perfume.

It does make sense, and is similar to the fact that you don't always hear your refrigerator buzzing, or a clock ticking (do people still have ticking clocks in their house anymore?). You also don't see the mess of bills that has all but hidden your kitchen table (do people still get paper bills?).

It's all about bandwidth, a word which has expanded its definition to now refer to "attention span." We don't have the bandwidth to notice every stimulus that wiggles our receptors.

But there is a product that aims to sidestep this problem. They devised a snappy marketing product at last year's Consumer Electronics Show in the form of an advent calendar. The idea is to first offer you a bunch of scents, to establish a preference profile. That's the 25 Days of Christmas part.

In this video, a reporter from the BBC samples the advent calendar. It's ironic how he smells all two-dozen scent tabs at once to gauge his "scent profile," because that generates a lot of nose-noise, making it hard to gauge preference. Hence the clever marketing approach to package it as an advent calendar, which is meant to spread the sniffs out over many days.

The real value comes from their smart-diffuser, which combines your preferences in differing amounts to provide you with a dynamic environmental aromacloud that doesn't negate its own signal over time. Every day is a surprise!

Image source

Notes:

CINQ makes intelligent fragrance diffusers that allow you to mix and match from 5 pre-filled fragrance capsules to create your own Personal Fragrance Profile - the combinations allow you to design combinations that have never been smelled before.

Smelly advent calendar beats 'nose fatigue'

Jan 2019, BBC News

Peer Pressure is the Market's Best Friend

AKA Febreeze is now teaching us about more than just noseblindness

Many years ago, an odor neutralization product was released on the market, directed at homeowners, or anything-owners who wanted to get rid of bad smells without actually getting rid of the source. (When the source of your bad smell is a teenager, for example, it's harder to just get rid of it, you know?)

Anyway, it didn't work too well. When they tried to do field research to explain why their product was failing, they discovered something that they probably should've already known, having been in the odor industry - people develop noseblindness to the bad smells of their own homes.

As the researchers knocked on door after door to figure out why their product wasn't working, they discovered that lots of people lived in smelly homes. But when you live there, day in day out, you develop a kind of resistance to your olfactory environment. This is the same reason you tend not to notice the buzzing of a fridge. It's called attenuation, and it's a way for your perceptual system to conserve resources. If something is lurking in my immediate vicinity, but it's been there for weeks already, I'm simply not going to notice it, because it's not a threat. If it was a threat (or an opportunity), I would have noticed it already.

People didn't realize they needed this odor-cancelling product, and that was a problem, obviously. So they did a pretty smart marketing about-face. They taught people to use their product after already cleaning something, to make it smell even better. This is basically an air freshener, except that instead of using it after making a room smell really bad, you use it after making a room smell good, by cleaning it. Pretty genius, I must say. Unless it didn't work, of course, in which case it would be the dumbest idea ever.

It wasn't a dumb idea, because Febreeze was a pretty successful product. Things must have changed, because it looks like Febreeze is changing their strategy. Now they're using what they 'learned' about noseblindness to pit us against each other.

If you take a look at this commercial (or not, since I'll describe it right now), you'll see how one person has developed a noseblindness to their own bad smell, and hence are made fun of by another person who lives with them, and who astutely solves the problem with Febreeze.

If you can't tell that you live in filth because your brain has tuned it out, your housemate will remind you. And if you're watching this commercial at the same time you're thinking how come nobody ever comes over to visit, maybe you can conjure an imaginary housemate to convince you to use an odor-cancelling product. Or you could also just clean your apartment, because that might have the same effect.

And if you’re an entrepreneur trying to sell a product, don’t just focus on your target audience, but the person right next to them. Lucky Charms knows something about this, you know what I’m saying? Happy Meals? Nothing convinces people like the people around them. In fact, anyone abusing social media to interfere with the political zeitgeist knows this very well.

Image source: Rocky III, the movie

Notes:

Febreeze commercial circa 2018