Sounds of scents: olfactory-auditory correspondences in the online purchase experience of perfume.
| Autor | Mahdavi, Mehdi |
1 Introduction
Recent years have witnessed online shopping as a booming research theme in the area of marketing and consumer behavior. Although a great deal of attention has been dedicated to the subject in the extant literature, surprisingly, the informativeness of the internet regarding experience goods, in particular perfume, has been scarcely explored. Arguably, purchasing fragrances online without previous knowledge of the scent leads to problems with purchase decision making. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this issue has been neglected by the extant literature. Hence, this article aims to explore whether cross-modal correspondences between the human senses and, in particular, the senses of olfaction and audition, help e-shoppers with their purchase decision making given the absence of the real scent in online settings. Based on the work of Weathers, Sharma, and Wood (2007), to enhance product displays and to deal with customers effectively, it is crucial to understand the role of online communication strategies in consumer evaluations of products. Similarly, the olfactory-auditory correspondences that can convey the characteristics of scents are deemed to be of high value and importance both for perfume manufacturers and sellers that intend to boost their online sales. Therefore, this paper tries to answer the following research question: How can olfactory-auditory cues help e-shoppers recognize whether a certain scent/perfume is appropriate for them?
Overall, this article makes several contributions to the research and practice. It addresses a particularly complex topic that has been neglected by the consumer behavior and marketing literature, by bringing together contributions from diverse fields of research (e.g., consumer behavior, marketing, psychology, chemistry) that help to understand how sounds are expected to be associated with perceptions of scent. Building on dispersed contributions in the literature, this article offers a theoretical basis for further understanding of how perfume consumers, particularly e-shoppers, associate sounds with scents. The article also provides first-hand perspectives from e-shoppers who shared their views and experiences regarding online purchases of perfume, namely on how sounds (e.g., music, the human voice) induce scent. As such, it provides anecdotal evidence of associations between types of scents and sounds, resulting in valuable cues for practitioners interested in effectively communicating perfume products, and demonstrating that the topic is relevant for consideration by researchers, including in but not limited to the fields of digital marketing and consumer behavior.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. After presenting the most pertinent literature, we discuss the results of a qualitative study including 27 in-depth interviews with consumers who have experienced online purchases of perfume. Then, we provide the conclusions, managerial implications, the study's limitations, and avenues for further research.
2 Literature Review
2.1 Challenges of selling experience goods online
It is widely acknowledged that experience goods present additional challenges for the consumer decision-making process, which, it can be argued, is particularly evident in the case of online purchases. As explained by Klein (1998, p. 196), "experience goods are dominated by attributes that cannot be known until purchase and use of the product or for which information search is more costly and/or difficult than direct product experience." In contrast, search goods are defined as "those dominated by product attributes for which full information can be acquired prior to purchase" (Klein, 1998, p. 196). Chiang and Dholokia (2003) explain that classifying goods as either search or experience is a common categorization. According to them, the possibility of evaluating search goods before purchase through external information is in obvious contrast with experience goods, which need to be personally checked before making the purchase. They believe this personal checking is the reason for the lower online purchase intentions of e-shoppers for such goods. Thus, search goods (e.g., books) can be purchased online with no significant difficulty, while experience goods such as perfume, due to their innate characteristics, are less likely to convince e-shoppers. As a result, online stores could not be as efficient as brick-and-mortar stores when experience goods are to be offered (Peterson, Balasubramanian, & Bronnenberg, 1997). In their research, Korgaonkar, Silverblatt, and Girard (2006) also have addressed consumers' concerns regarding online purchases of search (in this case books and personal computers), experience (in this case clothing, perfume, cell phones, and TVs), and credence (in this case vitamins and water purifiers) goods. Their findings showed that search goods were more favored by e-shoppers on the internet platform than both experience and credence goods. Moreover, the respondents were more willing to buy products such as clothing and perfume than cell phones, TVs, vitamins, and water purifiers. More recently, Verhagen and Bloemers (2018) have illustrated that when e-shoppers are planning their online purchase decisions regarding experience goods, in this case perfume and shampoo, they make a basic cognitive evaluation of the online outlet and the products offered prior to the affective reactions that will finally lead the e-consumers to make their purchase. Pan, Kuo, Pan, and Tu (2013) have revealed that the association between price surcharges and online purchase intention is moderated by the product category, i.e., whether it is search, experience, or credence goods/services.
Consequently, Choi, Choi, and Lee (2006), suggest that it is necessary to transform experience goods into search goods if the seller intends to offer them online. Zhang, Ge, Gou, and Chen (2018) further explain that online shopping is not a top priority for products such as perfume due to the high levels of perceived risk associated with the inability to test the real scents (Claudia, 2012; Kacen, Hess, & Chiang, 2013). Physical access to the products before purchasing them is highly valued among perfume shoppers (Levin, Levin, & Heath, 2003), therefore certain types of brick-and-mortar outlets could not be replaced by their online rivals (Phau & Poon, 2000). Lian and Yen (2013) also have found that higher prices, having less control of payment details, and having less access to product information compared with brick-and-mortar outlets are major obstacles for e-shoppers of cosmetics as experience goods. Therefore, in line with Lian and Yen's (2013) conclusion regarding the difficulty of online sales of experience goods, it is emphasized that communicating perfume properties while the real scent is absent is a real challenge both for consumers and companies (Schifferstein & Howell, 2015).
2.2 Olfactory-auditory correspondences
Shams and Seitz (2008) believe that life experience involves constant multisensory stimulation and it is likely that our brain operates best in multisensory environments. Crisinel and Spence (2010) also state that our everyday perception of the world is very often multisensory. There are everyday life examples in which a combination of olfactory and auditory cues are perceived, for instance, experiencing the aroma of food while hearing the mastication process. Another example would be smelling a car's exhaust fumes while hearing the car's engine (Seo & Hummel, 2011). Stevenson, Rich, and Russel's (2012) findings show that odor cross-modal matches are both semantically and perceptually supported. They conclude that there are reliable associations between a scent and taste, color, pitch, and texture. Nehme, Barbar, Maric and Jacquot (2015) also infer that cross-modal correspondences between all sensory modalities are likely to occur. In line with this, more than one sensory system is required to obtain information from the surrounding environment to be processed by the brain in order to experience coherent sensory stimuli, the importance of which is even greater for the human sense of olfaction, which is robustly dependent on cues from other sensory systems (Zhou et al., 2019). Given this, cross-modal correspondences, which are defined as matching information from different senses, are systematically experienced by human beings (Levitan, Charney, Schloss, & Palmer, 2015).
The long-held recorded belief that certain fragrances are associated with certain tones of music can be traced back as far as 150 years ago. The perfumer Piesse (1867, p. 38) highlighted this bond between scents and music, saying that "There is, as it were, an octave of odors like an octave in music." He even believed that the mechanisms responsible for interpreting olfactory and auditory cues work in nearly the same way. This tight bond between music and scents has also been echoed by contemporary perfumers. When interviewed by Ackerman (1990), Sophia Grojsman, a Belarusian perfumer, stated that composing music is similar to producing fragrance. There is also some resemblance between the professional terms used by perfumers when creating scents and those usually used by musical composers when creating music (Deroy, Crisinel, & Spence, 2013).
Recent laboratory experiments conducted by scholars have yielded interesting findings regarding the associations between olfaction and audition in humans. In one experiment, the participants were able match auditory pitches with certain odors. It was also revealed that odor quality could mediate this olfactory-auditory association (Seo & Hummel, 2011). Experiments conducted by Crisinel, Jacquier, Deroy, and Spence (2013) have revealed striking results. Their findings have shown that the olfactory-auditory association highlighted by previous research could be projected in more detail than ever. For instance, higher pitches were significantly...
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