Pervasive in Products : These Days, Lemons Are Cleaning Up

Although her mother used a pine-scented wax to polish the furniture in their Canoga Park home a generation ago, today Jan Zussman prefers lemon-scented cleaners to keep her furniture dust-free and her dishes spotless.

“I guess it’s the idea that lemons cut grease and smell good,” mused Zussman, a 28-year-old administrative assistant at a Los Angeles accounting firm. “It’s not that I dislike pine, but when I smell a lemon I think of the natural and fresh outdoors.”

It used to be that when consumers smelled a lemon, it was in connection with a $9,000 clunker parked in the garage. But these days, the fragrance of Citrus limonia is wafting from so many detergents, polishers and dish-washing liquids that the supermarket household products aisle is beginning to smell like the produce section.

Scent Added to Products

Mr. Clean has lost that piney smell. It’s gone lemon. And there’s lemon-scented Comet cleanser, Windex window cleaner and, this month, Cascade detergent. In the last 21 months, at least 78 household cleaners and laundry products have been introduced with lemon. There is even a new lemon-fresh Brillo soap pad.

But even as lemon seems to have surpassed pine in popularity, there is another aroma of sorts moving on to supermarket shelves: no smell at all. Lever Bros. has introduced an unscented detergent called Surf, and Proctor & Gamble now offers unscented Tide, advertised as “100% perfume-free.”

But to America’s merchants of clean, the smell of success today is lemon.

“Lemon is by far the most popular scent in household cleaning products,” said Phylomena M. Augurusa, manager of soap and household products at New York-based International Flavors & Fragrances, the nation’s largest producer of smells and flavors.

Sales Increased 5.9%

Last year, sales of lemon-scented household cleaning products increased 5.9% to $429.9 million, while sales of pine-scented products declined slightly to $161.6 million from $162.9 million in 1985, according to the New York market research firm Selling Areas Marketing Inc.

The growing use of lemon scent and the waning popularity of pine illustrate how a product’s fragrance can be as important to consumers as packaging, advertising or even how well the product works, experts say. Lemon’s popularity may also reflect Americans’ changing views about housecleaning, as more women enter the work force and devote less time to fighting household grime.

“The traditional view has been that if the product didn’t stink it didn’t do the job,” said Donald E. Payne, executive director of Oxtoby-Smith Inc., a market research firm in New York. But with Americans devoting less time to housecleaning, he said, strongly scented specialized cleaners such as floor waxes and laundry pre-soaks are being abandoned in favor of easier to use and more pleasant smelling all-purpose cleaners.

A University of Michigan study published in 1985 found that of the list of activities that people do every day, housecleaning ranked lowest in enjoyment--behind grocery shopping, cooking, reading or doing home repairs and far behind going to work or taking care of children.

“Consumers want something that is pleasant to use,” said Brian Curtiss, senior product manager for Lysol at Lehn & Fink Inc., which makes pine, herbal and lemon-scented disinfectants and cleaners. “Cleaning the house is already an unpleasant enough job.”

Not all household product companies have jumped on the lemon bandwagon. Oakland-based Clorox Co., whose unscented Formula 409 is the third most popular household cleaner behind Pine Sol and Mr. Clean, does not market a lemon-scented cleaner, a spokeswoman said.

Yet Clorox seems to be among the few holdouts.

Besides household cleaners, there are lemony nail polish removers, shampoos, soaps, bubble baths, deodorants and perfumes. In most cases, however, the aroma isn’t from an actual lemon at all but rather derived from dipentene, a chemical that smells like lemon and can be man-made or extracted from oranges, according to Craig Warren, vice president of research at the fragrance maker IFF.

It seems odd that a tart-tasting fruit, whose name is widely used as an epithet for defective products, would grow so popular in housecleaners. After all, no one scent so dominates any other household or personal product category such as air fresheners, perfumes, bar soaps or deodorants, experts say.

“I guess the bright yellow color has something to do with it,” offered Zussman, the Los Angeles administrative assistant who prefers lemon to pine. “It reminds you of sunshine.” By contrast, she said, pine products don’t evoke natural sylvan images because “I live in the city and there are no pines around.”

A Logical Choice

Manufacturers insist that lemon is a logical choice for cleaning products.

“The lime fragrance is too sharp and too tart and doesn’t enjoy the same consumer acceptance,” observed Sandy Sullivan, a spokeswoman for Clorox.

“It’s nice to have that lemon fragrance on your countertop in the kitchen,” said David Perkins, a spokesman for the Drackett Co., maker of Windex and Drano. “Pine isn’t the kind of fragrance you connect with food. You wouldn’t want to eat something that smelled like pine.”

You might not want to eat something that smells like lemon, either.

In the early 1980s, for example, scores of consumers got sick after drinking free samples of Lever Bros.’ lemon-scented Sunlight dish washing liquid that were distributed during a direct-mail campaign. The product boasted on its label that it contained “real lemon juice,” and many consumers apparently thought the liquid was a beverage. Despite the mishap, however, Sunlight went on to become a hit product.

Lemon’s enduring popularity seems to fly in the face of recent buying trends, which have seen Americans splintering into new classes of shoppers with vastly diverging tastes. Yet a host of scents ranging from green vegetable floral (Windex) to cherry almond (Scrub-Free heavy duty bathroom cleaner) have failed to successfully challenge lemon’s dominance.

Some experts attribute lemon’s staying power to a lack of imagination on the part of product managers who, when they want to introduce a “new and improved” product, simply add lemon scent.

“What happens is a product manager will look at a couple of success stories and believe that he can boost a product’s sales by adding lemon scent,” said John Quelch, a Harvard Business School professor who specializes in consumer marketing.

But appealing to consumers’ olfactory sense can be tricky.

‘Strong Correlation’

“Our sense of smell is controlled by the limbic system, which is the same part of the brain that governs sex, emotion and memory,” said Milton Wolpin, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Southern California. “There’s a very strong correlation between smell and memory. It’s hard to sell a product” that brings back bad memories.

What’s more, fragrance preferences apparently aren’t universal.

“In the Spanish market, people prefer strong scents,” said Harry Lawless, a senior research scientist at S. C. Johnson & Son, a Wisconsin-based consumer products maker. “The Germans want the smell to go away real fast. Here (in the United States) the public is a little more flexible. I see that with the growing popularity of air fresheners. And there has been a lot of interest of late in creating an odorless product.”

Other experts agree lemon’s days may be numbered.

‘Don’t Want a Scent’

“There’s a whole bunch of people out there that don’t want a scent,” said Elizabeth Donovan, a senior consultant for Kline & Co. Inc., a market research firm in Fairfield, N.J. “Tastes change.”

After only a few years on the market, American Brands dropped its Twist lemon-scented cigarette in the late 1970s after it failed to attract a significant share of smokers, a company spokesman said. The 100-millimeter cigarette contained a lemony aroma that was said to soften and enhance its taste.

More recently, cosmetic maker Estee Lauder has come out with a line of odorless cosmetics. And Lever Bros. has dramatically increased its share of the $3.3-billion detergent market with Surf, its new laundry detergent that claims to remove odors rather than masking them with a particular scent.

In television commercials for Surf, a sweaty man walks up to his daughter after jogging or playing a game of softball and the girl recoils in disgust, saying, “P.U.” and “your shirt smells icky.” Later, the father gets a hug from his daughter after the shirt is washed in Surf. In the wake of Surf’s success, Proctor & Gamble introduced unscented Tide in March.

Criteria Have Changed

“Twenty years ago, the criteria of what made a good mother and wife was spotless dishes and immaculate floors and women needed something that telegraphed the signal that their homes were clean. That’s why pine became such a big hit,” said Gary Stibel, a packaged goods expert with the New England Consulting Group in Westport, Conn.

But “smells are like fashion trends,” he continued, and the United States is entering the “age of odorless. . . . I guess we want ‘less’ in everything these days.”