CASE STUDY

Understanding Emotional Responses to Fragrance in Context

fragrance in context

The Challenge

A global fragrance company wanted to profile how four new fragrances were experienced, with a specific focus on their functional emotional use. 

The goal was to understand which fragrances naturally support different emotional states, for example, which scents help calm or reduce anxiety in work environments, and which feel more appropriate in contexts requiring reassurance or comfort, such as high-trust or service-led settings. 

This introduces a more contextual question: fragrance is not experienced in isolation. The same scent can be perceived differently depending on where it is used and what emotional role it needs to play in that moment. The challenge is that fragrance doesn’t sit at a conscious level. 

People can describe what they like, but the emotional response that determines how a scent functions in context is often less accessible through direct questioning alone.

The Solution

We looked at both sides of that response: what people said, and what their reactions showed more implicitly. Each respondent’s data was processed individually through EMNet. The system identified which attributes were most strongly associated with each fragrance and how these naturally clustered together. We didn’t impose structure early, we allowed it to emerge from the data.

This created a “prototype” for each fragrance, a profile of its emotional character, which could then be labelled with descriptive words like CALM, ADVENTUROUS, or CONFIDENT.

We then extended this into functional interpretation. Not just how a fragrance is perceived, but what emotional state it is most likely to support in context, such as calming arousal in high-pressure environments, supporting emotional comfort in trust-based settings, or aiding focus and composure during the working day.

The Outcomes

Each fragrance showed a distinct emotional signature defined by its strongest associations. One, for example, was labelled both CALM and CONFIDENT. It evoked feelings of calm and relaxation alongside energy. In functional terms, this type of profile is more aligned with environments where emotional regulation is important, such as maintaining focus and reducing tension in high-pressure work settings.

Across the set, the research made it possible to move from describing how fragrances are perceived, to understanding how they behave emotionally in different usage contexts. It also clarified something more practical: small differences in emotional structure translate into meaningful differences in where and how a fragrance should be used, whether that’s supporting calm concentration, easing stress responses, or creating emotional comfort in sensitive environments.

Research supports this: a Journal of Retailing field study found that a single-note orange scent increased actual spend by 20% over a more complex alternative in the same environment, not because it was preferred, but because it was processed more fluently and felt more congruent with the setting (Herrmann et al., 2013).

In this case, traditional research alone might have identified which fragrances people said they liked. But combining implicit and explicit methods measured the deeper, implicit emotional responses, the subtleties that make each fragrance truly distinct.

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.

References:

Herrmann, A., Zidansek, M., Sprott, D. E., & Spangenberg, E. R. (2013). The power of simplicity: Processing fluency and the effects of olfactory cues on retail sales. Journal of Retailing, 89(1), 30–43. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jretai.2012.08.002

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