S. Danilo 1*, M. Kergoat 2* C. Garrel 1, H. Nicod 1

1) ADRIANT®, France

2) Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense, Department of Psychology-EA3984, 200 avenue de la République, 92001 Nanterre Cedex, France


Is the limit of consumer tests on fragrances already reached? Consumers have a very personal, complex and unique relationship with fine fragrances, which is hard to handle with classical consumer tests (sniff test, focus groups, etc). Consumers can hardly explain this strong and specific connection based among others on memories and cognitive perceptions. Classical studies help to make it clearer with questions such as moments of use, woman who would wear it, ingredients, associated colors… But is the instantaneous overall liking reliable enough to predict the success story of a new fragrance?

New ideas to characterize fragrances are necessary to complete and to “refresh” the current tools. The objective of this research is to identify a new non verbal tool to understand consumers’ perceptions of fragranced products.

A different approach based on “feelings” instead of words is proposed here.
First, thanks to several qualitative focus groups, six positive states of mind were highlighted and translated into boards (joy, sensuality, adventure, magic, mischievous, elegance). It appeared that six categories (natural, animals, food, persons, music and miscellaneous) were required by consumers to translate these “feelings” into pictures.

Then, six boards were qualitatively obtained. To confirm that the pictures were unidimensional and well-understood, a quantitative test was conducted. The answers were compared to the expected results leading to some modifications of the categories (faun & flora, objects, persons, music and miscellaneous).

Six perfumes from the market were selected as stimuli for the final step. This choice was based on different criteria: they had not to be well-known and had to belong to different olfactory universes. The fragrances were evaluated in a sequential monadic way. Then a score was calculated for each feeling (by factorial analysis). The results show that this method is helpful to get new and additional information on these perfumes.

Keywords: fragrance, non verbal tool, qualitative stimuli, feelings