AKA Febreeze
is now teaching us about more than just noseblindness
Many years ago, an odor neutralization product was
released on the market, directed at homeowners, or anything-owners who wanted
to get rid of bad smells without actually getting rid of the source. (When the
source of your bad smell is a teenager, for example, it's harder to just get
rid of it, you know?)
Anyway, it didn't work too well. When they tried to do
field research to explain why their product was failing, they discovered
something that they probably should've already known, having been in the odor
industry - people develop noseblindness to the bad smells of their own homes.
As the researchers knocked on door after door to figure
out why their product wasn't working, they discovered that lots of people lived
in smelly homes. But when you live there, day in day out, you develop a kind of
resistance to your olfactory environment. This is the same reason you tend not
to notice the buzzing of a fridge. It's called attenuation, and it's a way for
your perceptual system to conserve resources. If something is lurking in my
immediate vicinity, but it's been there for weeks already, I'm simply not going
to notice it, because it's not a threat. If it was a threat (or an
opportunity), I would have noticed it already.
People didn't realize they needed this odor-cancelling
product, and that was a problem, obviously. So they did a pretty smart
marketing about-face. They taught people to use their product after already
cleaning something, to make it smell even better. This is basically an air
freshener, except that instead of using it after making a room smell really
bad, you use it after making a room smell good, by cleaning it. Pretty genius,
I must say. Unless it didn't work, of course, in which case it would be the
dumbest idea ever.
It wasn't a dumb idea, because Febreeze was a pretty
successful product. Things must have changed, because it looks like Febreeze is
changing their strategy. Now they're using what they 'learned' about noseblindness
to pit us against each other.
If you take a look at this
commercial (or not, since I'll describe it right now), you'll see how one
person has developed a noseblindness to their own bad smell, and hence are made
fun of by another person who lives with them, and who astutely solves the
problem with Febreeze.
If you can't tell that you live in filth because your
brain has tuned it out, your housemate will remind you. And if you're watching
this commercial at the same time you're thinking how come nobody ever comes
over to visit, maybe you can conjure an imaginary housemate to convince you to
use an odor-cancelling product. Or you could also just clean your apartment,
because that might have the same effect.
And if you’re an entrepreneur trying to sell a product, don’t
just focus on your target audience, but the person right next to them. Lucky
Charms knows something about this, you know what I’m saying? Happy Meals?
Nothing convinces people like the people around them. In fact, anyone abusing
social media to interfere with the political zeitgeist knows this very well.
Image source: Rocky III, the movie
Notes:
No comments:
Post a Comment