The Scent of Morality

Affluent consumer groups are increasingly adopting virtue-signaling commitments (Currid-Halkett 2017; Bean, Khorramian, and O’Donnell 2018; Harper 2021), which stimulated the market of ecoethical products and artisanal lifestyle commodities. In the past two decades, Scandinavian marketers launched a solid stream of Nordic-labeled brands on global markets of gastronomy, architecture and fashion, and came to represent ecological balance and ethical consciousness along a distinctly emerging “regional” aesthetic design. Skandinavisk, a British-Danish B-corp certified joint venture produces home and body fragrances for cosmopolitan consumers, who aspire for a more balanced and empathetic way of living. In this study we unpack the narrative and olfactory foraging strategies of Skandinavisk to penetrate an already saturated and morally contested perfume market. Through interviews and netnography, we critically discuss olfactory meaning-making and the sensory semantics of seasonal fragrance series, with keen attention to the strategic connection of the Nordics with emergent olfactory codesfor cleanliness/purity and respect. Recent studies revealed distinct strategies of affective and moral governance (Emontspool and Giordi 2017; Bajde and Rojas-Gaviria 2021), along which marketers sensitize consumers to their duty of care for society and planetary resources. Our analysis builds on and extends the literature on affective governance by discussing the embedding of morality into “naturally foraged” olfactory experiences.