I notice that laundry detergents, and some dish detergents like to add lemon as a big plus to their product. On the other hand, floor cleaners always seem to use pine scents.
Why those particular two scents? Howabout Downy, now with the scent of pineapples! Or Pine Sol, now with extra soybean scent!
And why those two scents for those particular products, why not have pine-scented dishes? Is the reason based in Madison Ave., or something about the difficulty of adding certain scents to certain products?
Lemon juice is a good agent to cut grease and was (before all the “miracle” products following WWII) used for that purpose. As Johnson & Johnson and their competitors began making chemical solvents to replace all the home-made cleaning agents, they tried to evoke the feelings that people associated with getting things clean. Their earliest products actually included lemon juice. Then they shifted to simply putting the aroma into the product, relying on years of association to sell the product.
Pine scent has a similar tale. There are actually a number of products that are still made with pine extract that are intended for use on floors. Pine extracts were a common floor cleaner, back in the days before linoleum and its successors, when the floors were actually wooden. As floors were made with new synthetic products, the old cleaners were simply used on the new floors. New chemical cleaning agents just attempt to keep that continuity of association by adding the scent.
(I’m not sure why Lemon Pledge® (and its competitors) get lemon instead of pine.)
The newest aromas are simply an attempt to capture market share by “branching out” to offer a wider variety of odors from which the consumer may choose. (Since I really do not like pineapple, I tend to refrain from putting something in the laundry tha will turn my stomach. YMMV.)
There is a national/cultural bias at work in the area of domestic scents, at least in Aus. Here, lemon=floor, dishes, clothes, clean; pine=toilet, drain cleaner, not clean.
I agree with what Tomndebb about the history of the scents, and suspect (IANAC) that one big reason the pine scent was used in the aforementioned drain/toilet cleaners is that the active agents were phenolics, and the pine scent was stable.
Let me start by saying that I have no cites for the following to hand. There may be some, but I haven’t looked.
[Semiamusing urban mythette] Some time back an off-shore manufacturer, against the advice of their local marketing agency, tried to promote a range of pine scented personal care items. Sank like a bomb. As the local marketing agency tried to explain at the time, pine is not redolent of the great woody outdoors here, eucalyptus/teatree is.[/Semiamusing urban mythette].