CASE STUDY
Strengthening Brand Identity
Through Scent and Visuals
When a fragrance design company was commissioned to develop a new scent for a fabric conditioner, the brief quickly expanded beyond the fragrance itself.
The client wanted to refine the formula and refresh the imagery used in marketing materials at the same time. The challenge was understanding how these elements worked together. A fragrance that performs well on its own can lose impact if it is paired with the wrong visuals, and updated imagery can underperform if it doesn’t reinforce the feeling of the scent.
What the client needed was clarity on which combinations created a clear, distinctive identity, and which ones risked blurring the brand with competitors.
Using our IMPRESS tests, we tested a mix of existing fragrances, competitor scents and new formulations alongside both current and new marketing images.
We explored how people instinctively linked scent and imagery, rather than asking them to rationalise those connections. This made it possible to see where associations were strong and coherent, and where there was overlap or confusion.
The results showed that the client’s existing imagery wasn’t helping the brand stand apart. While the images were positively associated with the client’s current fragrance, they were also strongly linked to a competitor’s scent, limiting their ability to differentiate the brand.
The new visuals formed much stronger and more exclusive associations with the new fragrance formulations. One new formula in particular aligned strongly with three of the four new images, pointing to a clearer and more distinctive identity when scent and imagery were paired correctly.
Additional analysis using EEG found that two attributes correlated strongly with EEG liking. One image stood out for producing particularly strong contrast in response, making it easier for consumers to recognise and react to at an instinctive level.
Together, this gave the client confidence in which fragrance–image combinations created a coherent, ownable identity, and which elements were quietly undermining it.
In this case, traditional research alone would have missed how the existing images were also reinforcing competitor perceptions, reducing differentiation for the brand.
If you’d like to understand how this approach can be applied to your own challenge, get in touch with one of our market research experts, here.
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