The Art of Selling Scents : How Visuals Shape the Perception of Perfume

One of the differences between buying perfume and other items online is not knowing what you, as a customer, are getting. Let me clarify.

If you want to buy a purse, you go to the website, you see a photo with a model wearing it, you know the size, you like it, and you buy it. But when you want to purchase a perfume online, you don't know if you are going to like it or not. Even when the list of ingredients is shown, it does not say much to the customer. So, what are other ways to help them decide on purchasing? How do you market such a product when a customer doesn't know exactly what to expect before purchasing?

I think the answer is obvious: by evoking such feelings through visual images, just as the perfume does. It’s about matching the feeling we get from the visual images with the feeling we get from smelling the perfume.

Yes, the scent won’t evoke the same associations in everyone, but it’s also about marketing— out of endless interpretations of the scent, which one to choose and emphasize to position the product on the market, and that is the beginning of another process.

For example, when I first got Silver Mountain Water by Creed, these images would describe my impression of the scent :

While I put an image of the snowy mountain, the rest of the photos are not directly associated with the background information from Creed (that the perfume was made with the inspiration of the Swiss mountains).

You might think that I’ve drifted away from the main idea of this fragrance, but based on my interpretation of this particular perfume, those images convey the very feeling I get. Therefore, it does not always have to be a literal representation, repeating the themes of snow and mountains over and over. It becomes a game of words and images to convey the emotions that scent stirs within us. It's up to the imagination of the person to describe it in a roundabout way to others.

In simple terms, the first step is capturing the feeling we get from the scent and then turning it into images, which can be used as a moodboard to decide how to photograph the product, how to approach the visual marketing task, which direction to take, etc. I'll revisit this topic in the future to discuss it further, but for now, I'll keep it short and concise.

To sum up, this was a brief overview of how the interpretations we have after smelling a perfume can guide us in presenting it to others on the market.