A Colorful World Under the Nose: Designing for Olfactory Brand Experience

Abstract

With their reflection on the conventional vision-dominant research focus, the olfactory experience has been recently attracting a rapidly growing number of researchers from various fields to pursuit new knowledge on it. Psychology (from a more basic perspective) and business consumer research (from a more applied or practical perspective) perhaps are the two most prolific fields of this topic. However there is an obvious gap between the theoretical and laboratorial findings and the real world commercial practices. This thesis studies the existing scent design and olfactory branding process from design research’s perspective, and aims to bridge this gap by providing a guidance of constructing olfactory experience in the branding process to enhance the long-term consumer-brand relationship.

In this thesis, a synesthetic visualization approach is created in order to assist consumers communicating the olfactory imagery and association, meanwhile to help olfactory designers obtain more inspirations from the target consumers. Furthermore, an optimized olfactory design process is proposed for optimizing the design phases of consumer research, scent creation and implementation at a strategic level. It provides a powerful tool to help companies access a synergic olfactory branding strategy.

The optimized design process was implemented in a real design project-“ON THE ROAD” which involved designing a signature scent for a new shoes brand, and also integrating the olfactory touchpoints in the sensory branding process.