Can seeing a luxury brand name or bottle before smelling a perfume change how it feels, even when the perfume itself is the same? In one experiment, fragrances were rated as more familiar when accompanied by luxury-related information than by information associated with less luxury. Pleasantness ratings also tended to be higher, but heart rate and the muscles involved in facial expressions did not change along with them.
This study explored not only whether brands influence impressions of a fragrance, but also whether people’s reported feelings and their bodily responses change in the same way.
The same contents, different information
A research team including researchers at the University of Geneva first asked 60 female students to rate how luxurious perfumes seemed based on their names and brands. They used those results to prepare information conveying luxury and information conveying comparatively less luxury.
Twenty-one female students participated in the main experiment. The researchers analyzed data from 19 after excluding two because of problems with the measuring equipment. Each participant experienced all three conditions, with sessions spaced one week apart.
In the first condition, a screen displayed the perfume’s name, its luxury brand name, and the corresponding bottle. In the second, it displayed the name, brand, and bottle of a different perfume perceived as comparatively less luxurious. The third was a baseline condition showing a three-digit number and a neutral, transparent bottle.
In every condition, participants actually smelled the same nine commercially available luxury perfumes. Only the information on the screen changed; the fragrances were presented using pen-like devices. Participants were not told that they were smelling the same perfumes each time. The order of conditions was counterbalanced across participants, and the order in which perfumes were presented was randomized in each session.
Each session also included two presentations of pens containing no perfume. These were used to examine whether information could influence perceptions even without an olfactory cue.
Measuring feelings and the body, not just pleasantness
Participants rated the fragrances’ pleasantness, intensity, and familiarity. They also used a scale for feelings associated with odors, responding across six dimensions: pleasant feeling, sensuality, unpleasant feeling, relaxation, sensory pleasure, and refreshment.
At the same time, the researchers recorded breathing, skin conductance, and changes in heart rate. They also measured electrical activity in muscles at the brow and cheek to examine responses involved in facial expression. The timing of sniffing and the way participants breathed were standardized, and responses after fragrance presentation were compared.
If luxury-related information influenced emotions broadly, changes might appear not only in verbal ratings but also in these other measures. That was the research team’s question.
Familiarity was the clearest change
Familiarity ratings were higher in the luxury-information condition than in the less-luxurious-information condition. However, neither of these two conditions differed significantly from the baseline condition displaying only a number. The way information affected ratings also differed from perfume to perfume.
For pleasantness, the overall test across the three conditions showed a significant difference. In the individual comparisons between conditions, however, the differences suggesting higher ratings in the luxury-information condition than in either of the other two did not reach the conventional significance threshold. The appropriate reading is therefore that ratings showed an upward tendency, not that displaying a luxury brand will reliably make the same fragrance better liked.
There was no significant effect of information on perceived fragrance intensity. Luxury-related words and images did not raise every type of fragrance rating at once.
Different perfumes evoked different feelings, but brand information had little effect
Ratings of the six feelings differed between perfumes. Just as one perfume might evoke relaxation and another a different feeling, the pattern of ratings varied with the fragrance. Changing the luxury-related information accompanying the same perfume, however, produced no significant changes in these feeling ratings.
No significant differences between information conditions were found in breathing, skin responses, heart rate, or facial muscle activity either. The authors discuss how changes found in people’s own ratings do not necessarily appear simultaneously in other indicators of emotion.
The unscented pens produced a somewhat different result. In the Results section, the authors report greater refreshment in the luxury-information condition than in the less-luxurious-information condition. Refreshment here was assessed using terms relating to feeling energetic, invigorated, and clean. However, the difference between conditions was at the boundary of statistical significance, and the authors describe their interpretation as tentative.
Separating luxury-related information from the fragrance itself
When participants were asked to identify the perfumes at the end of the experiment, they correctly identified an average of about 1.3 of the nine. This makes it unlikely that their responses can be explained by recognizing many of the perfumes, although familiarity with the luxury brand names themselves could be relevant to their impressions.
The manipulation also bundled together the perfume name, brand, and bottle image. The experiment did not isolate the effects of price labels, in-store service, or holding an actual bottle. The participants were a small group of young female students, so further research is needed to establish whether people from different cultures or with different perfume experience would show changes of the same magnitude.
In discussing why no differences in bodily responses were found, the authors point to the fact that the perfumes were generally pleasant and did not span a broad emotional range, as well as to the sensitivity of the measures. Rather than concluding that brands have no bodily effects whatsoever, it is more useful to understand the findings as limited differences in some self-reported ratings under these particular conditions.
The study included authors affiliated with Firmenich and reports support from the company and Swiss research funding.
Summary
Even with the same nine perfumes, showing names and bottles associated with luxury led to higher familiarity ratings than showing information associated with less luxury. Pleasantness ratings also tended to be higher, but clear differences were not established in the individual comparisons between conditions.
By contrast, luxury-related information produced no significant differences in the six feelings evoked by the perfumes, heart rate, breathing, or facial muscle activity. The unscented pens showed a limited change in refreshment. Information we see and hear forms part of the fragrance experience, but understanding its influence requires separating whether we like a scent, what we feel, and how our bodies respond.
References
Baer T, et al. “Dior, J’adore”: The role of contextual information of luxury on emotional responses to perfumes. Food Quality and Preference. 2018;69:36–43. doi:10.1016/j.foodqual.2017.12.003
