Artificial scent used to induce happiness, hunger and stimulating you to buy more goods used in shops
Walking in the shopping mall the scent of fresh baked bread spiralling up into your nose, or fresh roasted waffles - makes one's mouth water, doesn’t it; makes you desire to eat it. Or the enticing scent of fresh coffee, grapefruit, chocolate… yummy!To drop a bombshell: these are most likely not the real, actual scents but substitute artificial aromas released on demand!
Chemists have managed to duplicate the smells of popcorn, cinnamon buns, waffle cones, sugar cookies, coffee, chocolate, and even grilled hamburgers - and sell them to companies who use them to seduce us to follow our noses with one reason only: to sell their goods and increase their profit.
Bill Barum has worked in food services and product development for several decades with companies including Kraft foods, Harrah’s Casinos, and Walt Disney. At Disney he helped come up with a way to make pre-cooked hamburger patties and French fries taste and smell like they were fresh.
Bill Barum: “The food scientists put together a topically applied grilled scent that would melt at 110 degrees and would impart the smell of fresh grilled hamburger and the smell of fresh cooked French fries. Then we took it further and we implanted scent machines, in shrubbery… that had infrared triggers, so when you walked by it dispersed the fragrance which immediately sent your taste buds crazy and you started looking for that cotton candy, for that popcorn, or for that caramel apple or whatever it was.”
So, now our noses are also subject to commercial exploitation – in Dutch we say “we worden bij de neus genomen” – we are taken by the nose, which means: we are pulled a leg. The companies want us to consume more – even more than we already do; and eat that hamburger, French fries, buy that product. By pairing real food with artificial scents infused into the air in the store via scent machines, to induce their sales…
Also non-scent-related companies have discovered scent as a trigger for manipulating consumers to buy (and buy some more) Walking by the Computer store, the smell of new electronics lures you in and gets you in the mood of entering, lingering there and chances are you buy... Samsung for instance is experimenting with the use of a signature scent as a brand identifier in their stores. Ambient scenting became already standard practice in lingerie stores, casinos, the hospitality sector (for instance to create the "Zen-retreat" experience), airports…
While vision is unquestionably our most powerful sense, when it comes to garnering an emotional response, scent is a much more powerful trigger. "Seventy-five percent of the emotions we generate on a daily basis are affected by smell," says Lindstroem. "Next to sight, it's the most important sense we have.” So no wonder companies came up with the idea to use our noses against us.
Bill Barum: “We think we have a choice --but our choices are being guided by the way modern marketing has analyzed our behaviors and the way they have analyzed our sensory perceptions with sight, sound and smell.”
There it is: we are just programmed robots – with the companies as the sly programmers. Most of us consider free choice of paramount importance and will fight to defend our right of free choice. All the while there is no such thing as “free choice”: we are pre-programmed into a personality from the moment we are born. All seemingly “choices” we have aren’t choices for real – because when you are limited to a programming, your options to choose from are as limited as the programming. Real free choice entails an unlimited range of possibilities – but we are not able to see this unlimited range, simply because we are restricted to a personality-suit-view. Like wearing glasses with distorted angle without knowing it is distorted. As the scent-industry shows: we think we choose to go in and buy that hamburger – but it is the scent machine that made you go in and you didn’t notice; you thought it was you deciding…It’s not such a nice picture – us being directed by a simple scent machine… Us being directed by feelings and emotions and thoughts we are not even aware off we are reacting to. Perfectly operating little machinery we are. Robots.
Time to take off the personality-suits and allow ourselves to be who we really are. Join me and other human beings in our process of realizing and establishing ourselves as who we are for real.
Want more info on the subject of the distorted view and lack of actual free choice? Want to know how to take off your personality suit? Visit http://desteni.co.za, website and forum
Recommended read
Are you a sucker for airy memories and are fragrances determining your buying habits by SylviaWe fear even our own smell by Arvydas
Scenting business is Big Business
“Scenting an entire building is the latest ambition in a growing business that has, for years, gone unnoticed by most consumers. Roger Bensinger, executive vice-president for scent marketing company Prolitec, estimates there are now 20 companies worldwide specializing in ambient scent-marketing and dispersion technology. While many of these companies are privately held, industry executives value the business at roughly between $80 million and $100 million. These enterprises typically pair with fragrance companies and share in the scenting and machine maintenance dues, which can range anywhere from $100 to $10,000 a month depending on the size of the space to be scented.”
sources:
Scented Temptations: Artificial Scents Help Stimulate Consumer Appetites
Wikipedia – Flavor
New York Grocery Store Pulls A Heston Blumenthal, Uses Artificial Scent Machines To Increase Sales
Scent Branding Sweeps the Fragrance Industry
Smells Like Brand Spirit
