- Apparently not everyone finds the smell of fresh toner appealing. We tested "fresh toner," "freshly printed and bound book," "burnt marshmallow," "fresh coffee," and several other smells with our focus group, but apparently our sample was too small or too biased. As it turns out (based on our real-world trials) most people have their own idiosyncratic group of "happy" smells.
- Apparently not everyone finds the smell of burnt popcorn offensive. We believe there must be a correlation between this problem and the first problem with our campaign, but we haven't had time to track it down just yet.
- Apparently some people find certain smells appealing in certain contexts and offensive in other contexts. The smell of a newborn baby's diaper, while perfectly acceptable in the context of a nursery, tends to offend people in a restaurant. Weird.
- Apparently it's too costly. We spent quite a bit on our first campaigns, and because of the problems listed above we didn't get a very good return on our investment.
Sunday, November 16, 2008
The demise of odortising
It is with great sadness that we must announce our intent to abandon odortising. The decision was not taken lightly. In fact, we had several long board meetings to discuss the complex web of alternatives and options, but we finally decided to let it die because of some fundamental problems:
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2 comments:
Sometimes you have to do what you have to do. It still stinks.
The previous comment was not meant as a clever joke about "odortising" and "stinking." I meant that our office still stinks from all the research we were doing. It turns out that certain smells do not blend well together. For example "fish oil" and "peppermint" is a particularly noxious combination.
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