
In this workshop, ‘Fanatic Heart’ curator Cusson Cheng will join Ching Chan to discuss how scent fosters imagination and fantasy, and how perfume brands utilise this ‘animalistic’ inducement in celebrity endorsement to entice fans to buy the particular fragrance. This marketing strategy operates on one of two assumptions: that fans seek to emulate their idols through scent, or that fans seeks to create intimacy with their idols through scent—even if the association between a scent and its endorser is at times attenuated. The workshop will be an olfactory exercise that invites the participants to smell different fragrance samples in order to disentangle the relationship between what/who a scent evokes in different users vis-a-vis what/who certain brands seek to portray with their fragrance products.