The perfect smell is no smell at all – or is it?

Throughout the years businesses have come up with catchy phrases and slogans designed purely to sell products into a certain market segment. In today’s uber-competitive business environment, companies are often willing to spend thousands or even millions to find that one perfect phrase that holds the potential to transform a product into every consumer’s best friend.

The fact that I am taking the time to write an article about one such a slogan is just more proof of how effective a few professionally strung together words can be.

I came across a slogan recently proclaiming that “the perfect smell is no smell at all”. At first I thought that this was such a clever way to think about the concept. That was until a few days later it occurred to me that this statement could also be construed as non-sensical by it’s very definition!

Let’s think carefully about the concept of “no smell” for a little bit.

One would be accurate in defining “no smell” as the total absence of any type of olfactory input. The only feasible way to accomplish this, short of invasive surgery, would be to hold your nose or plug your nostrils and to breathe through your mouth.

Now we all know that terrible feeling when a bad cold robs us of our ability to smell anything and we also know that one of the unfortunate side effects of not being able to smell is that our ability to taste is severely inhibited at the same time.

To clarify my point, think about when a sighted person closes his or her eyes. Whilst it would sound reasonable to assume that the sighted person does not see anything with closed eyes, the reality is that the sighted person is still experiencing a vast number of visual inputs compared to what a non-sighted person will experience.

The sighted person still retains the ability to distinguish between countless shades of light and dark, something which the non-sighted person does not experience. With a non-sighted person, the absence of sight is exactly that – no visual inputs at all…

Most commercial assumptions pertaining to a product can be validated by obtaining feedback from focus groups representing a specific group of consumers based on a number of shared characteristics that define this subdivision as a suitable target market for the product being tested.

When testing a fragrance or an offensive odor, things tend to become a whole lot more complicated because smell is such a subjective and personal experience. No two people in the world experience a particular smell in an identical manner.

That being said, there are however a wide range of chemical compounds that are universally deemed to be offensive. In addition, it is well known that too great an intensity of any odorous compound, fragrant or otherwise, will invariably result in the odor being perceived as offensive at some stage.

When you visit the local supermarket again, have a look at how fragrances are sold in packaging designed to match a visual image with a description of a specific set of fragrances. The visual aid combined with a vivid description assists greatly in “guiding” the consumer to a certain conclusion – or definition if you want – of what the actual product really smells like.

Whilst this visual associative process is extremely effective, it can also be somewhat deceptive when the visual image does not reflect accurately on the intended application or environment in which the product will actually be applied.

To prove this point – next time that you purchase a toilet deodorizing spray, simply replace all the graphics on the bottle with an image of the real environment where you will be using it. You will almost certainly find that the way you now define the fragrance will not match your previous definition of the fragrance in that bottle.

In other words, when you see a picture of a rose and someone tells you it is a rose covered in early morning dew, you’ll automatically expect it to smell like your favorite rose.

Conversely if one start adding other descriptions such as mountain mist or floral bouquet or zesty citrus to it, chances are that you have yourself a veritable symphony of alluring fragrances and images all woven into one singularly pleasant and very personal definition of what you now think the end result should smell like.

That brings me to what I was doing at the time when this whole “no smell” thing popped up. I was in the lab formulating a product base that could be used as the active ingredient in a “fresh” and “non-perfumed” industrial odor controller.

Questions like What is “fresh”? and more importantly What does “fresh” smell like? immediately comes to mind.

To me, “fresh” can be best described as the smell of crisp new linen. Non-perfumed most definitely does not mean “no smell”, to me it means mastering the art of subtlety to an extent where the human nose no longer differentiates between the expected and the actual odor profile of the specific space where it will be encountered.

I believe that our sense of smell adds immense depth and richness to the world we live in and I personally can’t think of many fates worse than not smelling anything at all.

But that’s just me, what do you think – is no smell really the perfect smell…?