Adjectives are at the top of a marketer’s tool box, and most of those adjectives are about what something looks like, or how it feels. Very few are about how it smells. Oh sure there are the perfumes and food and wine which are often described in laughable terms.
A nose by any other name would smell as sweet
Does a wine that smell like woodchips or fruity with a hint of grass sound attractive to you? And how about a perfume that smells like ‘sweat’. Oh don’t worry, we are talking ‘good sweat’ not ‘bad sweat’. Remind me again, what does good sweat smell like, if not deoderant?
But very few other items are advertised by how they smell. For some products that’s a bloody good thing, otherwise they’d never sell any.
Does anyone sniff the cat’s food as if they are taking in a great whiff of their lover’s nape of neck? Do you choose your blue cheese on how much urea you can smell or whether it is so potent it makes you want to chunder like you were from the land Down Under?
It’s not typical is it, so imagine when I came across this curious piece of marketing when I was wondering around the local supermarket in my weekly grocery stupor. Febreze is a popular UK brand of indoor air freshener. I’d not come across it before I arrived in the UK but my Englishman swore by it. He had been living with a chain smoking landlady for over 18 months and basically didn’t go anywhere without it. Clothes a bit whiffy after a tumble in the hay? Febreze it! Spilt three day old milk in your best sweater so badly that it’s turned yellow with rancidity? Febreze it. Febreze with its cheerful smells of roses and lavender was his answer to most problems.
Personally I think clothes benefit from a good airing on the washing line, but then I came from a country where you can actually put clothes on the washing line and not have them rained off 99% of the time! But then, as I saw in my local Sainsburys, Febreze has come to New Zealand. Or rather, it has been to New Zealand and taken a long deep whiff of the local air (that’s fresh air that is, smells good don’t it!) and brought it back to England and…
……. shoved it in a Febreze bottle!
Now, being a natural born Kiwi I’m a bit concerned about what genuine Kiwi smell they shoved in that bottle. Did they bottle the Rotorua one (thermal activity makes Rotorua smell like rotten eggs!) or the green fields one? (a la cow pats and wet wool?) or was it that wonderful smell of Auckland smog in the morning?
I shouldn’t have been concerned. Here’s what Melanie said on her Yahoo review of Febreze! (No, I didn’t know they did Yahoo reviews of air freshener either!)
This one has a gorgeous refreshing misty fragrance, that resembles a scent you would smell if you were standing beside a raging stream, with the mossy rocks nearby, and the light misting of refreshing fresh water hitting your skin.
New Zealand Springs is definitely woodsy and rugged, but with all Febreze fragrances, that official clean, fresh fragrance still lingers closely behind the woodsy riverbed scent.
Er right you are then! So, I wonder Melanie; ‘Have you actually ever been to New Zealand?’
I did have a sniff and it smelt like complicated molecular polymer whatsits MEANT to smell like fresh stuff, or whatever a London based cooped up advertising copywriter thinks it smells like. Not at all like a dripping wet walk around the waterfront when the wind is blowing so fiercely it’s actually chucking salt water up your nose and is helpfully giving your sinuses a work out. It doesn’t smell like ponga or green manuka, nor does it smell like South Island snow or Northland’s surf.
But then you’d need a pretty big bottle for that. I think they call that bottle, an airplane to take you there.
If they put England, or your country in a bottle, what would it smell like?
NB/Melanie’s febreze review – http://voices.yahoo.com/review-febreze-air-effects-zealand-springs-7912796.html
