Back in 2018, at the very beginning of my work on Your Tasting Brain, I reached out to some experts in various aspects of the chemical senses and the things we use them for. I incorporated some of their comments in the book, but most of them had a lot more insightful things to say, so I’m presenting them, lightly edited in a series.
Interview conducted in June of 2018 in Wauwatosa, WI
John Lenhart is a chemist who worked for household product manufacturers, eventually becoming interested in aromas and their effect on people and their perception of products. This really wasn’t an interview in the sense that I had to ask him a lot of questions. I just pointed him in a direction and he was off. His words, from here on out:
In the Business of Smell
Early on, I was working for Proctor & Gamble, helping formulate Liquid Tide, at a time when detergents were all powder. It’s a really complicated product. I was modeling it in 7 dimensions, to help translate chemistry to functional characteristics.
Then I went to Dow, working on household products in their Central Research. Eventually I landed at SC Johnson (1993) in Racine and put my modeling techniques to work on Dial soap. I started getting inside the consumer’s head. Our job was to take products to market, to go from 1000 variations to 100, to one winner, so we were concerned with consumer testing and how to speed things up and get better results.
I found that people could only focus on three characteristics, and would ignore the rest. So we would give them ‘products with a hole’ that had some obvious characteristic missing, then after we got them accustomed to those, we would add the item of interest to us and we would get a more meaningful response.
Our problem was that every consumer trend or fad follows a bell curve. At first, only a few people are onto the trend, but then the curve slopes upward, and peaks, then starts back down. The fat part of the curve lasts about 18 months. For a large company, the time it takes to get a product to market often means missing the peak, and the profit is only made in the last, declining part of the trend. So, there is huge value in shortening the timing and getting the product onto the shelves before the trend peaks.
By redoing the consumer testing setups, we got a lot more meaningful information much quicker, which made the company a lot of money. They asked me ‘Where do you want to work,’ and I said ‘I want to work on fragrances.’ That’s where all this sensory stuff really started for me. I started hanging out with perfumers. They’re artists, very competitive, secretive with each other—and paid very well.
I was sitting in this guy’s office in a flavor house and he said ‘Do you like s’mores?’ Yes, of course. He wrote a quick formula and sent it to the tech in the lab, and a few minutes later, a sample came back that not only smelled like s’mores, but you could smell the campfire, the mossiness of the woods, the whole picture. A quick revision and then another sample. This time, the fire had been moved into the distance a little.
The problem for people in the fragrance business is habituation. It happens both on a short timeframe and also on a longer term, where we just lose interest as a fragrance becomes part of the background in any particular place.
Smell is a ‘delta’ sense. Meaning we only perceive it when it jumps above what our brain has determined is background. We have a blind spot in our nose and it’s the background. We just can’t smell it. Liking doesn’t correlate to anything in a linear manner. All of this turns out to be fundamental and very important.
The practice had been to test the fragrances in testing centers, but we started to suspect that the unfamiliar background aroma in those office-like venues was interfering with consumer perception. We started testing in peoples’ homes, where the background really was in the background, This eliminated a lot of noise in our results, which meant we got a lot more meaningful data.
I solved the habituation problem. We had a Glade cherry air freshener that lasted and lasted, becoming a big seller because of that. People in the industry couldn’t figure out how we did it. The secret was, the fragrance wasn’t actually cherry, but more strawberry. Peoples’ brains just couldn’t reconcile that mismatch, so it stayed in the foreground and held their attention. Of course, that all happened unconsciously. Similarly, to keep regular drinkers engaged, Mountain Dew changed their formula about four times a year, altering variables so the product was always just a little different and not the same old thing.
At SC Johnson we were working on a ‘universal fragrance.’ We tested it with baby boomers and got a lot of strong, happy memories of Saturdays with dad, shopping trips with a Coke at the soda fountain as a reward. With younger people, we still got a lot of strong memories of being close to dad, despite the fact that the era of soda fountains was over. Our fragrance did have a strong Coca-Cola note [orange blossom, lime, coriander, cinnamon] in it, so the soda fountain made sense. But it turns out that Old Spice aftershave also has a strong cola note, so that explained the memories. Aroma => memory => place => emotions.
So the habituation is a complicated problem, and happens gradually. In fact, the average person can pick out only three or four attributes of any aroma the first time they smell it, which limits the pleasure they can get from it. And each time they smell it again they pick up a couple more things, and the pleasure grows every time until they can’t pick up anything new, then starts to decline, and eventually turns into just background—fully habituated.
And it happens at short timeframes, too. The first Doritos chip tastes just great, but the deeper you go in that bag, every chip gives you a little less pleasure. That’s because the flavors are becoming background and not making the same impression as the first bite. They want you to eat the whole bag. Ever notice that about every tenth chip looks like the machine screwed up and absolutely blasted it with the seasoning? That’s not an accident. It has two purposes: First, it pumps up the flavor and keeps you interested; second, it gives you a little dopamine hit, like ‘I beat the system and got this prize.’
We were modeling all of this to help us get better, faster results from consumers with fewer false leads. We started throwing in a duplicate fragrance into the four choices in the tests, and when anyone ranked those two significantly different, we threw out their data as not reliable. That helped clean things up.
Language
‘Clean and fresh’ is the gold standard in that [household goods] business. We found that the sweet spot for people is not ‘just right, perfect,’ but ‘needs to be a little stronger.’ If it was at the ‘just right’ standard, people would tire quickly of it, but by making it just a little lower than desired, people had to hunt for it, think about it. And that kept them engaged.
Country Garden was another Glade air freshener. The fragrance was pretty much identical to Dior’s Poison perfume, which is marketed as ‘a rich blend of spicy, fruity, and amber notes warmed by honey and musk.’ But in the context and imagery of Country Garden, people pay attention to the floral/honey and maybe fruity aspects and ignore the more exotic and sensual ones. But they’re there in both cases.
Unconsciousness
We have two brains: conscious and unconscious. People say that we only use 10 percent of our brains, but that’s not true. We use it all, but that other 90 percent is unconscious, hidden from us normally. We saw a lot of unconscious behavior in the fragrance work. We were trying to figure out how to work with that, to come up with models and techniques.
The two parts have trouble communicating sometimes. Your unconscious brain doesn’t know what your conscious brain is thinking until you tell it, which is why some learning and behavioral techniques use feedback like saying something out loud, because that gets processed in different ways than our internal thoughts.