@tomturbomatic
I've spent years working in marketing with FMCG (Fast Moving Consumer Goods) companies and I know the US and EU markets like the back of my hand.
The major driving force behind all of these scents is quite simple. The large FMCG markers are desperately trying to distinguish their products. Scent is a very easy way of turning one generic product into 10 or 20 highly banded and distinguished products on a shelf. The more variants you have, the more shelf space you can occupy and the more market share you can achieve with the illusion of consumer choice.
Tide in the US is the ultimate example of this strategy and it has managed to push other brands off the shelves through sheer brute force merchandising and vast arrays of slightly tweaked products.
The same is true in Europe, but to a somewhat less single-company dominated extent i.e. you tend to have more of a balance between P&G and Unilever in the UK/Ireland and P&G, Henkel and Unilever in other EU markets.
What is freaking the FMCGs out at the moment is that consumers are starting to buy store brands in rather larger numbers than they have ever done in the past. The supermarkets have managed to create viable private label brands which have really done serious damage, particularly in Europe, to P&G, Unilever and Henkel's bottom line.
In the US, the threat is more from the likes of Henkel/Dial, Sun products etc which are disruptive to P&G's cozy position at the top of the food chain there.
Cultural norms for scents and also for food flavours are changing very rapidly. People are exposed to much strong flavours and scents than they were in the 1950s and they expect those kinds of options in a lot of consumer goods as a result. For example, if you look at the UK and Ireland, the average consumer now expects levels of herbs, spices and also strong cheeses that would have been totally unpalatable to a 1970s consumer in the same market. This is because of a change of general broadening of the pallet.
In terms of scents for detergents and other household products, there have been a major shift towards florals and towards nature-mimicing products and natural extracts. This is partially because there has been a shift away from 'chemical-type' scents due to 'green washing' i.e. an attempt to make a product seem natural and also because it's just possible to do it now and it wasn't decades ago.
In fact, I would say you might have difficulty selling some of the old formula scents to a modern market as they would be seen as over-simplistic or even unpleasant.
Laundry scents, like everything else follow fashions and trends, and a lot of the old classic scents are simply not likely to sell like they used to.
In a local context here, the old scents of Persil, Omo and Ariel were far more robust and simple clean fragrances than their modern varieties which are much closer to the kinds of scents found in cosmetics in many cases.
There's a hell of a lot of science behind "olfactory marketing" and companies spend literally hundreds of millions getting those scents just right
As for who makes the decisions on household products, sadly (in terms of the changing role of women) they are still very much in the driving seat in North America and in Europe when it comes to the weekly shopping.
That gender bias, is changing, actually fastest in Northern Europe, not the US, which might explain some of the marketing of Ariel and Persil in the UK which is now much more 'techie' products than they used to be. Take a look at the Persil small and mighty packaging or the Ariel Excel Gel packs. They're aimed at people who make decisions based on technology / slick branding and environmental concerns. Where as some of the other packaging and marketing is squarely aimed at the traditional female decision maker.
All-in-all, this kind of consumer marketing is actually a fascinating area of applied psychology ! Laundry detergents are still one of the key marker products too as they have been some of the heaviest promoted and most sophisticatedly marketed FMCGs going right back to the late 1800s. So, they always make for a great case study / trend analysis.
Soft drinks, perfumes, alcohols/beers etc are also the usual text book cases
