Sensory Design for Brands and Businesses
It’s a funny thing that our noses which shape the centre of our faces, have become more an object of aesthetic beauty, than a tool which can perceive and interpret the world around us in a vibrant colour of no sight and a sweet music of no sound; and imbue our world with a meaning that is personal, tangible and unforgettable.
Here is to the crooked noses, the bumps and the bulges, the hooks and the bends.
Here is to the silent wonder of our sense of smell. Go on – breath…….
While a dog’s brain is only one-tenth the size of a human brain, the part that controls smell is 40 times larger than in humans. A dog’s sense of smell is about 1,000 to 10,000,000 times more sensitive than a human’s, depending on the breed
Picture this: You’re on a packed rush-hour train, listening to music on your headphones and reading your smartphone. It’s too crowded to see your destination, and you miss your stop.
In the not-too-distant future, you won’t even need to look up. It will be your nose that tells you where to get off.
If all goes according to plan, all 30 stations on the Yamanote, Tokyo’s central loop line, will have unique “scent alerts” functioning much like the current platform melodies.
This innovative idea, plus many more, are part of a larger vision called EkiKA, in which East Japan Railway Co. (JR East) is making extensive use of what are known as “action-oriented aromas.”
“We already know that our olfactory system controls instinctual behavior,” Morita said, explaining the concept of sense marketing. “Through an evolved sense of smell, animals can identify safe food or dangerous predators. And, as perfume makers know, it’s how we single out and lure suitable mates.
“Similarly, it’s been proven that the right scents can stimulate appetites and even subliminally induce actions.”
Morita was given several years to find how to control the right scents on a massive scale. After several years of trial and error, the EkiKA project made its first real-world foray with action-oriented aromas.
For the initial AOA test, which took place at an undisclosed location, a subtle peppermint/eucalyptus blend was wafted into trains running in the morning. In the evening, weary commuters were treated to a calming lavender-based scent.
To the team’s surprise, though, local companies later reported a noticeable increase in productivity.
Emboldened by their successful trial, Hanada now views scents as a new way to provide meaningful signals and lessen distracting noise: “We know that platform feedback is overwhelming and stressful — the signage, the announcements, even the melodious chimes. Aromas, however, connect on a more subconscious level.”
With this in mind, Hanada said, JR East is also envisioning aromas as a possible deterrent.
Tokyo’s overcrowded train carriages are one of the railway operator’s biggest headaches.
“People invariably rush for the carriage closest to platform stairwells and overload those cars,” Hanada said. “There’s not much we can do to stop them.”
However, with powerful nebulizers attached to carriage exteriors, a specific train car could emit microbursts of an ammonia-based odor at the appropriate times. “Only people with a very dull sense of smell will be able to get near a deterrent-emitting car,” Hanada added.
As for the station scent alerts, Morita said they’re still under development. The smell of incense has been proposed for Sugamo, fishmongers for Okachimachi and musty books for Kanda, but Morita admitted that reaching a consensus for 30 unique scents will not be easy.
With that in mind, JR is sponsoring a survey in which anyone can vote.
What smell should represent Tokyo Station? Let JR know. Participants in the survey will qualify for a lottery to win multilingual scratch-and-sniff cards that will — once the project launches — help commuters identify the station-alert scents.
Liam Gleason reports: http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/04/01/national/scent-alerts-for-train-stations-set-to-cue-jrs-distracted-commuters/#.U2BqyPm1Yjw
Between the bouncy music and the stacks of colorful jeans, visitors to the Benetton store on Chicago’s Michigan Avenue might catch a whiff of a growing marketing trend. Mounted high in the corner beside the store entrance, a scent diffuser, the ScentDirect system from ScentAir, spreads a bright spring fragrance modeled after Benetton’s Verde cologne. “It finishes the emotion we are trying to create in the store,” said Robert Argueta, director of visual merchandising for the United Colors of Benetton, who also is testing the scent in Benetton’s New York flagship store. “It’s the first and last impression a customer gets.” Long the domain of casinos and hotels, marketing using scent is catching on among retailers and in car showrooms, sports stadiums, airports, banks and apartment buildings that seek to distinguish themselves with customers via the deeply influential sense of smell. Alexia Elejalde-Ruiz Reports: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-scent-branding-20140419,0,4880702.story#ixzz2zndAnweG
Fragrance can be felt but never seen or held, a fleeting impression, a conjurer of bye gone emotions, a flirtation of future encounters.
Perfume is the ultimate tease. Join AllSense as we cast our eyes back over the ages to reveal the essence and aspiration of the times as reflected by the scents we wore and the advertisements which epitomised them.
Featured Here: Vintage Mid Century Perfume Ad Muse by Coty 1947 Beautiful by Artist ERIC
The Scent Of Love: How Smells Affect Attraction In Humans And Animals
Israeli researchers performed an experiment where women watched a sad movie scene, and collected the resulting tears. When they wafted the sad-tainted tears under the noses of some male subjects, the response wasn’t, as they expected, a surge in empathy, but a decline in testosterone levels and sexual arousal.
And pair bonds may increase our sensitivity to a partner’s scent. Researchers collected sweat from volunteers to capture their body odor while they were in a neutral mood, or in a variety of heightened states – fear, happiness or arousal. Then they gave the sweat samples to another person – either a stranger to the first subject, or a romantic partner. Though participants couldn’t distinguish between specific emotions conveyed through sweat, they could distinguish between neutral and moody odors – and the romantic partners were able to do it better than strangers, with those in the longest-term relationships performing the best.
Zookeepers and biologists have discovered that tigers, cheetahs, jaguars and other big cats go wild for the smell of Calvin Klein’s Obsession for Men. In one Bronx Zoo experiment, cheetahs stuck around sniffing Obsession-sprayed objects for more than 11 minutes – longer than they usually linger over a meal, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Obsession is “a combination of this lickable vanilla heart married to this fresh green top note — it creates tension,” fragrance designer Ann Gottlieb, who created the Calvin Klein scent, told the WSJ in 2010. But the key kitty-attracting component may be a synthetic replica of the musk produced by the cat-like civet.
“It sparks curiosity with humans and, apparently, animals,” Gottlieb said.
Edited from Roxanne Palmer – http://www.ibtimes.com/scent-love-how-smells-affect-attraction-humans-animals-1552638
WASHINGTON: The human nose can distinguish at least one trillion different odours, millions more than previously estimated, US researchers said.
For decades, scientists accepted that humans could detect only 10,000 scents, putting the sense of smell well below the capabilities of sight and hearing.
“Our analysis shows that the human capacity for discriminating smells is much larger than anyone anticipated, said study co-author Leslie Vosshall, head of Rockefeller University’s Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Behaviour.
The previous estimate for the nose’s capabilities — which are carried out with the help of 400 olfactory receptors — dated to the 1920s and was not backed by data.
Researchers have estimated that the human eye and its mere three receptors can distinguish several million colours and that the ear can discriminate 340,000 sounds.
“For smell, nobody ever took the time to test,” Vosshall said.
To conduct their research, scientists subjected 26 participants to mixtures made with 128 different odourant molecules that individually might evoke grass, citrus or various chemicals, but were combined in groupings of up to 30.
“We didn’t want them to be explicitly recognisable, so most of our mixtures were pretty nasty and weird,” Vosshall said.
“We wanted people to pay attention to ‘here’s this really complex thing – can I pick another complex thing as being different?'”
Volunteers would sample three vials of scents at a time — two that were the same and one that was different — to see if they could detect which was the outlier, completing 264 such comparisons.
Although volunteers’ abilities varied greatly, they could on average discern the difference between vials with up to 51 percent of the same components, with fewer volunteers detecting a difference once the mixtures shared more components.
Researchers then extrapolated how many odours the average person could detect if all possible combinations of the 128 odorants were sampled, coming to their estimate of at least one trillion.
Lead researcher Andreas Keller, also of Rockefeller University, said the number is almost certainly too low given that there are numerous other odourants that can mix in countless ways in the real world.
He said our ancestors relied more on the sense of smell, but that refrigeration and the development of personal hygiene have limited odours in the modern world.
“This could explain our attitude that smell is unimportant, compared to hearing and vision,” Keller said.
He added that upright posture, which raised humans’ noses far from the ground where odours often emanate, may also have contributed.
The sense of smell is closely linked to human behaviour and the researchers stressed that studying it could shed light on how the human brain processes complex information.
The study was published in the journal Science.
– AFP/xq
Read the complete piece here – http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/health/study-reveals-humans-can/1043580.html
A team of psychologists has found new evidence for smell language in the Malay Peninsula. In Jahai, a hunter-gatherer language spoken in the Malay Peninsula, there are around a dozen different words to describe different qualities of smell.
For example, ‘ltpit’ is the word to describe the smell of various flowers and ripe fruit, durian, perfume, soap, aquillaria wood and bearcat. ‘Ces’, another smell word, is used for identifying odour of petrol, smoke, bat droppings and bat caves and root of wild ginger.
The research team presented Jahai speakers and a matched set of English speakers with the same set of colours and odours to name. Each participant was simply asked to say ‘What colour is this?’ or ‘What odour is this?’
The researchers found that Jahai speakers could name odours with the same conciseness as colours but English speakers struggled to name odours. Grappling hard to describe smells, English speakers’ responses for odours were five times longer than their responses for colours.
According to the study, the inability to name smells is a product of culture and not biology
Researchers from Northwestern University have developed a new technique to rechannel memories while subjects sleep—by blasting them with various odours.
For the experiment, scientists conditioned patients to be afraid of a certain face by showing them a picture of the face along with a specific smell and then administering an electric shock. Patients would eventually learn to fear not only the image of the face but also the associated smell. The smell would trigger fear even when the patient was asleep and not being shocked, but after so many exposures, the fearful reaction would fade away. In effect, the exposure to the smell would do away with the fear.
This study sheds more light on the strong relationship between emotion and smell. Some scientists suggest that this is because the olfactory bulb where smells are processed is close to the amygdala and hippocampus, where emotion and memory are processed. Other experiments have been conducted that confirm the relationship, too.
http://gizmodo.com/scientists-successfully-erase-fear-using-scent-therap-1372199891
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