This one-day workshop brings together scholars from various disciplines, including marketing, history, and anthropology, to explore how businesses developed marketing strategies to appeal to consumers’ senses from the nineteenth century to today. Attention to sensory appeals became a crucial part of business strategies in the modern consumer-oriented economy. The workshop will encourage participants to explore such themes as the creation of sensory experience in modern capitalist society from cross-cultural perspectives, the impact of technological development on sensory perception, the commercialization of the senses, and the construction of knowledge about the senses. The program will feature prominent scholars in the studies of the senses, the history of science, and marketing, including David Howes, Daniel Horowitz, Steven Shapin, Gerald Zaltman.

Faculty and students are invited to attend, and you can RSVP to Ai Hisano (ahisano[at]hbs.edu).

Program

9:30-9:50  Continental Breakfast

9:50-10:00  Opening

10:00-10:30  Ingemar Pettersson (Uppsala University): "Mechanical Tasting: Sensory Science and the Flavorization of Food Production"

10:30-11:00  Ai Hisano (Harvard Business School): "Creating a New Visuality in the American Food Industry​"

11:00-11:15  Coffee Break

11:15-11:45  Steven Shapin (Harvard University): "The Tastes of Wine and the Market: Historical Changes"

11:45-12:15  Comment: Daniel Horowitz (Smith College)

12:15-1:15  Lunch

1:15-1:45  Galina Shyndriayeva (University of Tokyo): "Matters of Scent: Building the Perfume Industry in Twentieth-Century US and Europe"

1:45-2:15  Regina Blaszczyk (University of Leeds): "The Synthetics Revolution"

2:15-2:30  Coffee Break

2:30-3:00  David Suisman (University of Delaware): "Marketing and a Way of Hearing the World: Moses Asch and Folkways Records"

3:00-3:30  David Howes (Concordia University): "How Capitalism Came to Its Senses – and Yours: The Invention of Sensory Marketing"

3:30-4:00  Comment: Gerald Zaltman (Harvard Business School)

4:00-4:30  Discussion & Closing

4:30-5:00  Reception

5:00-7:00  Dinner for presenters and commentators