In recent years, many are the brands and companies that have used their senses to convince or seduce consumers. Scent marketing has become one of the almost inevitable resources of retail firms, which fight with each other to leave their olfactory mark and be immediately recognized by consumers who are in the vicinity of their establishments. Supermarkets have learned to use the smell of fresh bread as a tool to position the rest of their products, since the smell of fresh baked goods has an effect on purchase intentions. And stores have been playing with sounds and their effects on how consumers shop for a few years now. But why bet on a single sense when consumers have more than one? The truth is that the experience can be much more intense if it is played with the different senses and if the reaction to a stimulus in one sense is combined with that generated in another Cambodia Mobile Database. “You can deliver superior experiences for consumers that work better than a single sensory stimulus, providing a competitive advantage , ” explained to the thread of a study Gemma Calvert and Abhishek Pathak, of the Institute on Asian Consumer Insight, as collected Warc .
The two experts have just published an analysis in which they defend the potential of multisensory marketing, which is, ultimately, the future of relationships between brands and consumers. Multisensory marketing plays with much more complete and complex experiences when it comes to tracing stimuli that reach the consumer. The user not only smells what the brand wants him to perceive, but also receives a much more complete experience in which eyesight (using color ranges that reinforce what is transmitted by smell), hearing or even touch also play . The effects of multisensory marketing go beyond simply seeing an image and receiving the message. The Calvert and Pathak report starts from a complex starting point: consumers receive an average of 200 visual advertising messages per day, which has reduced their response power to this type of stimulus. Consumers no longer see them. Furthermore, the response margin to these images is very short. The consumer’s brain analyzes them in a few milliseconds and makes decisions about them in that record time.
Betting on images has therefore become much less effective. Faced with the limited impact of images, the rest of the senses have a much broader influence on the consumer, either consciously, because they know that they are being exposed to these specific issues, or subconsciously, since they are part of the so to speak atmosphere that surrounds them. Sound, taste, smell or touch have, they point out, a great influence on people’s perception. And, above all, they have it at the subconscious level of the brain, that section in which all brands want to enter and where they want to be processed because that way they achieve a greater permanence in the memories of consumers Brother Cell Phone List. All the senses are important And although some elements seem easily compressible, such as betting on certain fragrances or certain sound stimuli, the truth is that you do not have to stay alone with it.
The other senses can also play: the packaging can have a special texture or generate specific sensations (for example, being more or less heavy) and the product itself can enter the realm of the senses (with crispier French fries, for example). One of the latest examples of large-scale multi-sensory marketing was The Singleton Sensorium, a kind of immersive bar in London where visitors had to taste The Singleton of Dufftow whiskey in different settings and put a note on the experience. It was drank in three different rooms (of three different tones: red, green and brown) and in each one of them all the sensory stimuli that were received changed, from the visual to the smell or the sounds. Each of them played with one of the main flavor notes of the product and thus managed to highlight it. The experience served to test on a large scale by the winery behind the product (Diageo) how the environment changed the relationship of the consumer with the specific product. The tests also confirmed that some stimuli improved the flavor of the product itself by 20%. It is not the only study carried out to show that the customer experience can change if the surrounding stimuli are modified.
A study from the University of Oxford showed that sounds modify how we perceive food. Some sounds accentuate the sweetness and others make everything taste more bitter. British Airways took advantage of it to create a list of songs for their flights that enhance the taste of the food on board. “Everyone is now selling experiences,” explained Charles Spence, the Oxford professor behind the study. “In about five years, when you go to a wine store, you will be able to scan the code on the bottle and get the music list that matches your wine,” he says. The future will go through making better use of new technologies to create more complete and complex experiences that will further improve the perception that consumers have of brands thanks to stimuli. The next frontier will carry what brands do beyond making stores smell like pine at Christmas to sell more.
Some people are already talking about how augmented reality glasses will be used to improve the appearance of the food on our plates and make us eat some things (for example, healthier) while feeling others. Augmented reality will not be the only one that will change things. 3D printing can also modify the stimuli we receive and how brands create sensory experiences to be more effective and achieve more immersive actions. “In the future, if brand owners want to engage with consumers on a much more emotional level, build loyalty, and differentiate themselves from the competition, they will need to embrace the multisensory opportunities possible for them now,” Calvert and Pathak warn.
