Contamination Distance
Value Is Sometimes Suppressed by a Signal That Has Nothing To Do With the Product
Although companies invest in improving their products, they usually fail to identify the subtle signs that gradually diminish the attractiveness of already good products.
A secondhand clothing store in the Netherlands altered its environment. The clothes remained the same. The prices remained the same. The range of clothes remained unchanged. The staff stayed the same. The store introduced a smell: fresh laundry.
Spending went up considerably. It wasn't because the product was of better quality. Rather, it was because one element of the environment was removed.
It was not a factor customers were aware of. In a pre-study survey, concern about hygiene ranked second among the reasons people gave for buying secondhand items, outstripping considerations of style and price. Customers did not go into the store thinking about pathogens. Yet avoidance of pathogens was at work beneath the surface, acting as an unspoken discount on the perceived value of all the products in the store. The smell of freshly washed clothes did not add to the value; it removed the discount.
What the Research Actually Found
Matteo Perini and Jasper de Groot from the Behavioral Science Institute at Radboud University conducted a study in a real secondhand store under three conditions: one with the smell of clean laundry, another with a citrus scent, and the third with the store's usual smell. Spending rose only in the clean-laundry condition. Although citrus is a pleasant odor and is semantically linked to cleanliness, it does not prime the specific idea of clean clothes and therefore had no effect. The clean-laundry scent, because it primes the idea of clean clothes, did result in a noticeable increase in spending: the average amount spent in the clean-laundry condition was €28.71, compared with lower amounts in the citrus and no-scent conditions.
A laboratory experiment on its own verified the mechanism: individuals who had been exposed to the smell of freshly washed clothes judged secondhand clothing as not only less unhygienic but also more valuable. The effect was most noticeable among those with a higher tendency to avoid germs. These are the people with the greatest level of latent discount; the scent had the greatest impact in reducing their discount.
The researchers explain this in terms of what behavioral scientists call the behavioral immune system: the evolved tendency to avoid potential sources of contamination. It responds to psychological signals in the same way it does to biological ones. Objects that have been owned and worn by people whose identities are unknown trigger contamination associations that persist even after the objects have been thoroughly cleaned, because the association is not concerned with actual hygiene. It is based on the signal indicating contact with others.
The product wasn't the issue; it was a peripheral signal that was lowering the product's perceived value. It was better to remove the signal than to improve the product, since the product didn't need improvement and instead needed the discount removed.
The Category This Belongs To
It isn't about scent marketing; it is an example of a broader phenomenon with a specific term in psychology and very little recognition in brand strategy.
Psychological contagion often treats contact or proximity as significant, even when there is no rational basis for such a relationship. Objects that have come into contact with something negative develop negative associations that persist longer than the actual connection would explain. These associations are passed on and cause the value of anything they have touched to diminish, whether that was through physical proximity, visual adjacency, or categorical association.
In branding and marketing, this is known as Perceptual Contamination: the situation in which a peripheral signal reduces the value of a main offering not because there is a logical connection between the two, but because people tend to see proximity as implying a relationship. The parking garage is not the hospital, but patients who walk through a poorly maintained parking garage into a hospital building carry a contaminating impression that has not yet been eliminated. This impression follows them into the lobby, affects how they interpret the waiting room, and shapes their expectations of the care they will receive.
Studies of the arrival experience in healthcare settings consistently show that patients rely on environmental cues to judge the quality of care before seeing a clinician. If the building's exterior is dirty or shows signs of decline, it signals a lack of attention from the organization. This impression then extends to the patient's views on clinical quality, staffing standards, and the institution's trustworthiness, even though none of these factors logically relate to the condition of the parking lot. Yet the contamination still takes place.
Where Organizations Are Carrying Latent Discounts
Every organization has contamination origins that it has never audited, minor signals that quietly undermine the perception of value without anyone identifying them as the issue. They are not being addressed because they are not considered part of the brand system; instead, they are viewed as facility problems, IT problems, or operational backlogs. As a result, the perception cost they involve builds up unnoticed in the assessment of offerings that could otherwise be well received.
The outdated website adjacent to clinical quality claims
A health center with excellent clinical results and a website that appears to have been last redesigned in 2014 is, at the same time, sending out two conflicting messages. The high standard of clinical care is genuine. The website's outdated appearance is working against this, not because there is any logical link between the website and clinical standards, but because people tend to regard the two as belonging to the same system; patients who are conducting research before their first visit assess both aspects together.
The confusing proposal adjacent to claims of organizational competence
When a professional services company offers a sophisticated strategic service but then produces a proposal that is hard to navigate, inconsistently formatted, or visually disordered, it contaminates the decision about the relationship at the very moment that decision is being made. The proposal does not show that the strategy will be unsound, but it does convey information about how the firm operates, and this disclosure has a contaminating effect on the assessment of the capability claim.
The neglected waiting room adjacent to clinical care
Worn seats, uneven signage, outdated materials, and crowded surfaces are each, in themselves, matters for the facilities department; together, though, they create an unsanitary atmosphere that the patient is exposed to for twenty minutes before meeting their doctor. Research on trust shows that the physical environment is a primary channel through which patients form their expectations of the quality of clinical care. The state of contamination does not remain in the waiting area—it carries on into the examination room.
The empty restaurant adjacent to food quality judgment
An empty dining room during dinner service serves as a kind of social proof that has a contaminating effect; even if the food is excellent, the emptiness already contaminates how the food is assessed before anyone looks at the menu. That is why restaurant operators usually seat early customers at tables that are easily visible rather than at those toward the back: they are deliberately controlling the distance between the social proof and the judgment of the product.
The old employee portal adjacent to employer brand claims
An organization that presents itself as innovative and employee-focused yet uses a benefits portal last updated in a different decade of technological development is creating a source of contamination at one of the most important stages of the employee experience, and it is typically the people with the most choices who are most sensitive to this issue.
Removing contamination falls into a different category of brand investment than brand improvement, because it does not make the product better; instead, it eliminates factors that were lowering the perceived value of a good offering. While most discussions about investment focus on the first type, the majority of latent discounts are found in the second.
The Audit Most Organizations Have Not Done
Standard brand and marketing audits focus on the messages the organization is sending. They assess the quality, consistency, and effectiveness of deliberate signals—such as the website, collateral, campaigns, and messaging. It is almost never the case that these audits examine the peripheral signals that interfere with the assessment of those deliberate efforts.
A contamination audit begins with a different question: instead of asking what we are communicating, it asks what is discounting our communication. It traces the entire customer or patient journey and, at each point of contact, determines which signals are present—whether deliberately designed or accumulated—and checks whether any of them are acting as latent discounts on the image of the offering the organization is trying to convey to the audience.
The contamination sources identified in that audit are almost never found in the marketing budget; they are found in facilities, IT, operations, the HR systems stack and the presentation layer of the proposal process. The people responsible for managing these areas have not been made aware that the condition of these touchpoints affects the brand, and so make sensible decisions about them without guidance that links their decisions to value perception.
The work involved in establishing that connection doesn't mean that every peripheral touchpoint has to be redesigned or upgraded; it only means that you have to determine which of them are transmitting contamination high enough to undermine the value of the main offering, and then deal with those.
One Note on Healthcare
The framework of contamination aligns with the argument presented in an earlier ThinkWicker article on the pre-clinical sequence patients undergo before their first clinical interaction. The phenomenon known as arrival anxiety refers to the emotional aspect of that sequence, while perceptual contamination designates the mechanism by which each stage in the sequence can taint what comes after.
In community health organizations, the risk of contamination is higher than in most other healthcare settings because contamination signals most strongly affect patients who have the least prior trust. A patient who already has a good deal of confidence in an organization is more likely to interpret a contaminating signal in context and dismiss it; in contrast, a patient who is visiting for the first time or has had a negative experience with institutional environments before is more likely for the contaminating signal to confirm the fears they already had.
The asymmetry shows that, in the context of community health, removing contamination is not primarily an aesthetic investment; it is an investment in building trust, and the return on that investment is realized at the point of greatest vulnerability—the first visit, the first impression, and the moment before any clinical relationship has had a chance to be established.
When the owners of the secondhand store introduced a scent, spending went up. A narrow lesson can be drawn from this: that a pleasant ambient scent leads to increased purchasing behavior. That lesson has already appeared in the literature on the retail environment over a twenty-year period.
The more difficult lesson to accept, but also the more valuable one, is this: value perception isn't based entirely on what an organization does well; it is also influenced by peripheral signals that serve as discounts on that performance. The process of identifying and eliminating those discounts is a separate discipline from improving the main offering, requiring different people to be responsible for it and different questions to bring them to light. Yet it results in an improvement in value even though the offering itself doesn't have to be changed.
The product was already good. Something was suppressing it. That is often the case. Diagnosing it requires looking at what is adjacent to the offering, not only at the offering itself.
Some ideas are worth discussing in the context of your organization.
