Seeing, smelling, feeling! Is there an influence of color on subjective affective responses to perfumed fabric softeners?

Visual cues are likely to convey early sensory impressions and to generate strong expectations about product characteristics, which in turn could influence the final assessment of a product. The aim of this study was to investigate the influence of color on the verbal measurement of emotions in response to different perfumes in fabric softeners, the hypothesis being that color-perfume congruent pairs will induce enhanced positive emotional responses. In a first experiment, 102 participants were asked to report their feelings for nine perfumed fabric softeners, which were perfumed with one of three perfume variants and presented as one of three color variants. Verbal measurements of emotions were performed by using the ScentMove™ questionnaire. Results indicated that the subjective affective responses varied as a function of perfumes and were influenced by colors. A second experiment was conducted to verify whether the color-perfume congruency could be optimized. A group of 70 respondents participated in a color-matching exercise with the same three perfume variants and 10 possible colors, including the three original color variants. Results confirmed that other color-perfume associations could be more than or equally congruent to those presented in the first experiment. A third experiment was carried out to investigate whether increasing the color-perfume congruency would result in a significant increase of the subjective affective response. A group of 95 respondents were asked to report their feelings for nine perfumed fabric softeners, which were perfumed with the same three perfume variants and presented as one of three optimal color variants. The optimization of color-perfume pairing did not result in a significant increase of the subjective affective response. More generally, this study underlines the predominant role of perfume in the emotional response and a more limited influence of color.

► We investigated the influence of color on verbally reported emotional reactions to perfumes.
► Colors influenced reported emotions, independently of perfumes.
► Optimization of color-perfume pairing did not influence reported emotional responses.
► Reported emotional reactions are mostly determined by perfumes with a limited influence of color.