Abstract:

This paper presents a new approach to the measurement of fragrance 'ideas' (e.g. a fragrance for today woman), based upon the fit of a visual concept to a specific fragrance idea. The features of the visual concept are systematically varied by experimental design. The authors show that the driving force behind responses to these visual concepts is the respondent general proclivity to attend to different features of the concept, rather than the different fragrance ideas. The paper further shows that it is possible to identify synergisms among visual elements for fragrance concepts, but that these synergisms are far weaker than synergisms for text-based concepts. Finally, the paper shows that by using the data one can engineer better visual concepts by recombining these visual elements into new ideas.