Marketing textbook, chapter 3

External stimuli that can trigger emotions include scents, whose stimulus processing is anatomically closely linked to emotional areas of the brain.

Olfactory stimuli are the only stimuli that reach the so-called amygdala without first passing through the thalamus, the largest part of the diencephalon. The task of the thalamus is to filter the remaining sensory stimuli according to their importance and distribute them to sensory-specific (e.g. visual centre) and non-specific areas (e.g. attention). The amygdala is an area that reacts particularly strongly to personally significant or potentially dangerous stimuli. The amygdala is the main trigger of emotions and is directly involved in emotional conditioning. From this it can be deduced that scent stimuli are more strongly involved in emotional processes than other sensory stimuli and that they can activate extremely emotional, personal memories.

However, scents do not automatically trigger certain emotions, but only after they have been learnt in an emotional context. Infants do not have any pronounced scent preferences. They hardly react even to scents that adults clearly experience as pleasant or unpleasant. However, if they perceive the scent of baby powder while their mother is lovingly caring for them, the previously neutral care scent is charged with positive emotions and henceforth associated with affection. This emotional conditioning can lead to a lifelong preference for this scent, as the scent can reactivate the original emotions when perceived again. This also increases the likelihood that parents will groom their children with the brand products that they themselves were groomed with as children. New car odours are another typical example of this type of conditioning. In the blind test, they are experienced as rather unpleasant and chemical. Only the information that it is a new car odour leads to a significantly more positive assessment. This information places the odour in a different, pleasant context and activates the positive emotions associated with the odour (joy and pride of a new car owner). This natural principle of emotional conditioning offers a whole range of starting points in marketing. In order to profit from affective scent effects, for example, private labels are launched on the market with a scent that is similar to that of the market leader. Or the manufacturer of a baby care range markets care products for adults and uses fragrances for the new product line that are reminiscent of the baby care product and the feelings associated with it. Pleasant fragrances can also be released in shops to have a positive effect on customers' emotions. The more pleasant a fragrance is judged to be, the more intense the emotions triggered by the fragrance, because every fragrance that consumers perceive as particularly positive has previously been learnt in the context of a particularly pleasant experience and can reactivate these original emotions (cf. Hehn, 2007; Hehn/Scharf, 2012; also Herz et al., 2004, p. 371).

Sources:

• Hehn, P.: Emotional brand management with scent. Fragrance effects on the perception and judgement of brands, Göttingen 2007.
• Hehn, P./Scharf, A.: Der richtige Riecher; in: Markenartikel - Sonderheft 60 Jahre vke, June 2012, pp. 52-54.
• Herz, R. S./Eliassen, J./Beland, S./Souza, T.: Neuroimaging evidence for the emotional potency of odor-evoked memory; in: Neuropsychologia 2004, Vol. 42, No. 3, pp. 371-378