Communicative Anosmia and Poetics of Storytelling in Perfume Commercials

Abstract

Analyzing contemporary short-film perfume advertisements it becomes clear that it is not enough to use the paradigms of social-communication and media studies alone to grasp the complexity of the used techniques. The commercials are deliberately composed to achieve complex artistic effects so as to stimulate the prospective consumer wish to buy the product. Using sensual and aesthetic appeal of the videos allows perfume companies to achieve their marketing objectives without exerting any direct pressure. They rather opt for creating subtle, multimodal narrative effect of the campaign that works in tandem with the target addressee’s intersubjective engagement. It is the purpose of this article to discuss the range of aesthetic techniques and poetic (literary) patterns applied in construing attractive or intriguing, intertextually allusive adverts of olfactory products. The devices from the literary and non-literary storytelling are intended to compensate for the fact that smell is impossible to transmit directly in the used audio-visual media. The article will overview the compositional relations and arrangements of perfume commercials using methodology of literary studies informed by theoretical insight of other relevant disciplines.