How do you sell perfume on a screen that can't smell?

Imagined scent. The academic term is olfactory imagery, and in marketing research it's now a directly measured variable.

Sharma and Estes, writing in the International Journal of Research in Marketing, frame the problem exactly where you live it: scents can improve product evaluations, but incorporating scents into advertising and packaging is relatively inefficient and often hard to implement — especially online. Instead, they show across seven main studies (plus four supplemental studies) that pictures on packages and in advertisements can evoke imagined scents, thereby improving evaluations and increasing choice shares without delivering any actual scent (Sharma & Estes, 2024).

The subtle but decisive distinction: what you're selling isn't a description of the scent, it's the scent that forms in the viewer's head. A description is a list of adjectives; imagery is an experience. That difference decides whether a perfume ad works.

Yes — but not on its own. In one of the most-cited studies in this area, Krishna, Morrin and Sayin examined the conditions under which imagining what something smells like (which the paper calls "smellizing") affects consumer response. Response was measured four ways: change in salivation, actual food consumption, and self-reported desire to eat.

The results show that imagined odors can enhance consumer response but only when the consumer creates a vivid visual mental representation of the odor referent (the object emitting the odor).

— Krishna, Morrin & Sayin, Journal of Consumer Research, 2014

So imagined scent works only if the consumer can vividly picture the odor referent — the object emitting the smell (Krishna, Morrin & Sayin, 2014). State the limit too: these studies used food stimuli, not fragrance. The mechanism transfers logically to perfume, but it doesn't say "this lifts perfume sales by X".

The advertising translation is concrete: writing "bergamot in the top notes" transfers information but generates no imagery. Showing the cut peel, the moment the oil sprays out of it, the moisture on its surface — that builds the source of the scent in the viewer's mind. Same claim, same product, completely different mental event.

Think in three layers: the source of the scent, the shape of the scent, the moment of the scent.

1. Show the source, don't list the note

A direct application of the finding above. Instead of narrating the pyramid in text, put the sources in frame: bitter orange peel, wet moss, burning incense, freshly cut grass, the surface of a leather wallet. Keep Sharma and Estes' boundary in mind — pictures only improve evaluations for products where scent is a relevant or typical attribute (Sharma & Estes, 2024). Perfume satisfies that by definition; that's the category's advantage.

2. Match the shape to the scent

There are systematic correspondences between odors and visual shapes. Hanson-Vaux, Crisinel and Spence matched 20 odors against "kiki/bouba" style angular and rounded forms: two odors were significantly associated with an angular shape (lemon and pepper) and two with a rounded shape (raspberry and vanilla). Principal component analysis indicated that the hedonic value and intensity of odors matter in this association, with more unpleasant and intense smells associated with more angular forms (Hanson-Vaux, Crisinel & Spence, 2013).

Discussing their results, the authors point straight at your job: these correspondences can be used by perfume and wine marketers in choosing bottle, logo or label shape to convey the prominent notes through congruent odor–shape pairing. In practice this extends to the graphic language of ad creative — sharp edges and hard cuts for a citrus opening, rounded forms and soft transitions for a vanilla heart note.

Use this finding with restraint: the study ran with 25 participants, and only four of the 20 odors produced a significant shape association. You don't have a universal conversion table; you have a direction that takes the guesswork out of a creative decision.

3. Show the moment, not the result

A scent's "result" is invisible — but the moment of use is not. The first spray of the morning, the trace left on a jacket collar, what's still on the wrist at the end of the day. These moments establish both the source and the usage context in a single frame. On structuring the rest of the creative, our piece on why the first seconds decide everything is a good next step.

Surprisingly, yes — at least in the sense of consistent correspondences. Crisinel and Spence generalized the previously demonstrated association between perfumery odors and pitch to food and drink odors. They found that participants preferentially matched 25% of the odors tested to certain types of instruments, and principal component analysis showed that both pleasantness and complexity — but not intensity — play a role in choosing a pitch to match an odor (Crisinel & Spence, 2012).

The Reels translation: music selection isn't a matter of taste, it's part of the creative. Putting a heavy, dark bass under a fresh, simple citrus opening contradicts the scent you're trying to build in the viewer's head. Narrating a complex woody composition over a bright, cheerful trending sound produces the same contradiction from the other direction.

Don't overextend these findings either: they are association tendencies measured under laboratory conditions, not sales predictions. The right use is to ask, when choosing between two equally good tracks, which one doesn't contradict the scent.

This is the most valuable part of Sharma and Estes, because they measured the limits of the effect too (Sharma & Estes, 2024):

• The effect is greater among consumers with a stronger need for smell. The same creative doesn't do the same job for everyone.
• Pictures only improve evaluations for products where scent is a relevant or typical attribute. Perfume qualifies; forcing the same tactic onto a product with no scent proposition is wasted effort.
• Pictures of malodorous objects — despite being common in deodorizing products — actually harm evaluations. The "show the bad smell first, then the fix" structure is risky by this finding.

Two more category-specific limits. First, regulation: perfume is a cosmetic product, not a drug. Treatment claims and health claims don't belong in the creative; phrases like "reduces stress" or "regulates sleep" carry legal risk and strain platform ad policies. Second, unmeasurable promises: don't put a number on longevity or sillage ("lasts 12 hours") without measurement, because that is precisely the first thing a buyer checks on day one.

The third and most insidious limit: imagery doesn't substitute for scent. If the smell you built in someone's head contradicts what hits their nose when the box opens, what you earned isn't a sale — it's a return.

You can't remove the uncertainty, but you can shrink it. The barrier in fragrance isn't price, it's "how will this smell on me" — and the answer to that lives in the design of the purchase journey, not in the ad.

• Samples and discovery sets: they shrink the decision rather than postpone it, lowering the risk of a full-size purchase through commitment rather than price.
• Real customer language: the best sentences describing a scent come from reviews, not the marketing team. That's the most heavily measured form of user content — we covered why in why UGC outsells studio content.
• A comparison anchor: referencing a known scent family or recognisable profile is the fastest way to position an unexperienced scent mentally. It can be done at family and note level without naming another brand.
• Transparent returns and exchanges: because scent is personal, the return policy here isn't a cost line, it's a conversion tool. For how product page decisions affect sales, see our Shopify store setup guide for cosmetics brands.
• Scale and context: how many sprays, which season, what time of day. These details calibrate both the moment of use and the expectation.

In short: the ad makes the scent imaginable, and the purchase journey makes that imagination a bearable risk. Skip either one and the other won't sell alone. If you'd like to build the creative side together, see our content & creative production service.