J. Soc. Cosmetic Chemists, 18, 755-768 (Dec. 9, 1967) Measuring the Meaning of Fragrance •]. STEPHAN JELLINEK, Ph.D.* Presented September 20-21, 1066, Seminar, New York City Synopsis--Three different techniques for measuring the meaning of fragrances are reviewed. Profiling, Semantic Differential, and Multidimensional Scaling are discussed with special emphasis on the last. The application of these techniques by perfumers and in consumer testing is described. INTRODUCTION The title of this paper may be a little mystifying we do not usually think of fragrance as having a meaning, nor of meaning as being something measurable. The phrase "the measurement of meaning," was borrowed from Osgood, who described the uses of a new linguistic technique, the semantic differential, in a book by this title (1). We shall have more to say about the semantic differential and its use in measuring meaning later on. But what about the meaning of fragrance? It is quite obvious to anyone who has worked with fragrance that it would be highly inap- propriate to use a Tabu-type fragrance in a dishwashing detergent or an insecticide spray, just as it would be a hopeless undertaking to launch, under a sophisticated name and with a romantic advertising story, a perfume that smells like lemons and lavender. That quality of the Tabu fragrance which clashes with the concept of a detergent or an insecticide is what may be called its meaning. It is the message which * General Foods Corporation, 250 North St., White Plains, N.•. 10602. 755

756 JOURNAL OF THE SOCIETY OF COSMETIC CHEMISTS the fragrance conveys to the consumer, the connotations and asso- ciations which it evokes. In this sense, the meaning of a fragrance is its most important quality it is its reason for being. The function of a fragrance is always to convey a message about the woman (or man) who wears it or about the product in which it is used. If it succeeds in conveying the right message forcefully, the fragrance will be successful (2). If we accept this to be true, it becomes obvious that a perfumer, no matter whether his job is to create fragrances or to select them, must have a good under- standing of their meaning and of the message they convey. To be more exact, since the product with which he is involved will have to be sold to a specific public, he must understand the meaning which his fra- grances hold for that public. Understanding the meaning of a fragrance is very closely related to that most valuable gift a perfumer can have: the gift to predict what will sell. To get this understanding, the perfumer traditionally has had to rely on three sources of information: introspection (what message does this fragrance convey to me?), observation of market performance (what kinds of fragrances are successful in what products ?), and an understand- ing of certain chemical relationships (phenolic odorants occur in smoke and hence connote danger citrus oils smell refreshing since they are associated with sour fruits fatty aldehydes and indol are related to components of bodily excretions and hence have erogenous meanings (2). All of these approaches are indirect, and all have their pitfalls. Intro- spection fails if the perfumer is not completely in tune with his public market performance depends on many things other than the fragrance and the effect of chemical relationships on meaning has been largely in the realm of speculation and could not be proven. The direct approach--to go to a consumer or to a group of consumers and ask: What does this fragrance mean to you ?--has not been considered feasible in the past. There are several reasons for this. Every perfumer has had bad experiences with the layman's ability to identify odors or to react to them in any consistent way. He has repeatedly run into normal, intelligent people who fail to recognize the odors of the most familiar flowers or even of their own perfume, or who on Monday definitely prefer fragrance A over B only to reverse their judgment, with equal conviction, on Tuesday. After a few of these encounters, a perfumer tends to get discouraged about using laymen's judgments for guidance (3). Also, if you give people a fragrance and ask them to describe it, you usually