Don't Lose a Sale by a Nose

While it might dismay vegetarians, a roast in the oven was a turn-on for most. To stay on turf neutral enough for a vegan, you might try, as Cathy DeCenzo of Ashburn suggested, "onions, carrots and celery, the holy trinity sauté."

Just forget fish. Fried, especially sautéed--and definitely last night's--is on the no list.

The smell of fresh flowers, pine, oranges, lemons, grass, cedar and laundry dried outside on the line were nearly as popular as food aromas. But with the exception of lemon furniture polish, which got nods, the scents have to be natural. The artificial reek of scented candles, room deodorizers and antiseptic "hospital-smelling" cleaners such as Pine-Sol and Lysol were turnoffs.

As for dislikes: Stale cigarette smoke topped the list along with pet odors, particularly cat urine and wet dogs. Dirty laundry, shoes, stale sweat and bathroom odors all were close seconds.

"Fresh and clean, clean and fresh. The vocabulary is very limited," said Carol Berning who researches scents for Procter & Gamble. Among her products is Febreze, a fabric deodorizer. "The thing that people really like is that it leaves the house smelling fresh, not stale. . . . Like a beautiful spring day when the windows are open; that's the kind of fresh people like."

To refine that elusive scent of fresh, the product was home-tested by "tens of thousands of people," said Berning.

P&G has also "done a fair amount of research among real estate agents," Berning said. They have said that "when people go looking at a house . . . they want to think of themselves living there. So what they don't want are odors that come from other people's families--dogs, cats, babies . . . negatives. Like onions and sauerkraut. . . . We call it scent soup."

If you choose to add a stronger scent once the air is clean, that can be tricky, Berning said. "I probably wouldn't want to do something like flowers where some people like them and some don't. Most people like the smell of baking. . . . That is a very powerful homey smell."

"I'd love to see someone walk into a model home where a guy in a white hat was giving a cooking demonstration in the kitchen," said Craig Childress of Envirosell, a research company that studies "the behavior of people in retail environments . . . and model homes are part of retail."

Supermarkets are tapping into the lure of cooking aromas in a big way.

"It's not like the old days when you could smell the fish, the peanut grinder," Childress said. "They're pretty much wrapped up and sealed tightly. What's interesting to us is that cooking demonstrations are coming back in modern supermarkets. Management is not interested in selling the ingredients; what they are interested in is getting the olfactory sensation back."

He noted that many supermarkets are also adding another layer of temptation by revamping their circulation systems to vent bakery smells throughout the store. "The more involved you are with the five senses, the more you're going to want to purchase," he said.