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

Mummy-Eaters

People used to eat mummies, back in the 1800’s. Image source: wikimedia

The mysterious always has a way of wiggling past our common sense. When mummies were first discovered by the West, they were the height of public wonder. To preserve a body forever, and in such a way, was a shock to the imagination. The powerful aromatics used in mummification enticed curious people with lots of money to buy the craziest thing out there – mummy meat.

Eventually, with the initial mother lode of mummies exhausted, and the market still demanding more, opportunists arrived – entrepreneurs, perhaps. They impregnated recent cadavers with aromatic substances, wrapped them up, and aged them until the time was right, when they would be passed-off as authentic Egyptian mummy meat. People devoured its wonderment all the same. It was claimed to have special effects on those who ate it. But what was more intoxicating, the meat, or its mystery?

One thing is for sure – the smell of spice, incense, the eternal, and the foreign gave tangible credibility to such claims.

This story is taken from Annick Le Guérer’s Scent, the Mysterious and Essential Powers of Smell, written in 1988, translated from French in 1994.

Excerpt from Hidden Scents:

Odors only stimulate memory; they do not cause any other reactions by themselves. When one feels sick in the presence of an odor, it is not because of the odor itself but because of its association with previous sickness. Automobile exhaust smells and is deadly, but it is not deadly because it smells. The odor sensorium has no capacity for discriminating toxic from nontoxic substances. Odors are epiphenomenal, without any direct biological effect other than that on the olfactory system. Still, the powerful illusion that they cause pleasure and pain persists. Even when one knows that it was drinking too much whiskey that made one sick, the smell of it remains aversive as though it were the cause.* Because smell-response is learned, it only makes sense that upon repeated exposure to a smell, noxious or not, its alarming effect would wear off over time. Why else would you still be in its presence – “it mustn’t be dangerous” – and is therefore turned off, like a smoke alarm, disabled upon accidentally burning breakfast. Cognition is practically defined by its ability to move beyond this reliance on false alarms – it generates methods of identification completely unattainable in the detail and at the distance (both spatial and temporal) than that which is offered by olfaction.

*This is not to be confused with a “smell” that is trigeminally noxious. Mustard gas stimulates trigeminal nerves, not olfactory nerves. In fact, a good way to disambiguate smell from trigeminality is to determine whether it physically hurts. Smells do not hurt, they remind us of pain, but they do not physically cause pain.