SENSORY MARKETING
What is sensory marketing?
Before
we talk about sensory marketing, we should define sensory branding, which is a
type of marketing that appeals to all senses. Sensory marketing is the technique that is used to
reach your customer’s senses and influence their behavior based on how your
brand and tactics make them feel. As
we know, the five senses are sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell.
Sensory marketing is simply the process of winning a customer’s trust and
attention by appealing to each of these five senses.
To
no surprise, it has become popular among a variety of industries and businesses
around the world to implement sensory marketing into their overall strategy.
Why does sensory marketing work?
One word: Experience. Because you’re appealing to human
behavior and emotion, rather than relying on advertising gimmicks, a sensory
marketing strategy is one of the most effective ways to deliver unforgettable
customer interactions. After all, emotions are at the heart of the perceptions
that we build about brands. The more you engage the senses, the more of an
emotional response your customers will give.
How to appeal to your audiences’ senses?
1. Touch: Touch is a
difficult type of sensory marketing to embrace through digital marketing
tactics. Offline, however, there are plenty of ways to give customers a tactile
experience of your products. Whether it’s the texture you use in your
packaging, or the materials present in your product, the feel of your brand can
resonate with a customer on an intimate level. A bakery took a special approach
to the sense of touch: the packaging was chocolate coated and the business card
itself was made out of a biscuit.
2. Smell: Smell is
a powerful sense, and tests have shown pleasant smells can improve mood by 40%.
Find a way to incorporate scent into your brand and stick with it. A perfect
example of integrating smell to make consumers aware of the brand is Dunkin
Donuts. They installed aroma-releasing machines, diffusing the aroma of
fresh coffee every time the jingle of Dunkin Donuts was being played, which
became a huge success as the sales rocketed up to 30%.
3. Sound: Sound
takes many forms in advertising. Today, sensory advertising requires that all
brands find a way to use sound in their branding efforts. If it sounds
difficult, you can trust that there’s always a way to do it. Consider lingerie
giant Victoria’s Secret, for example, which plays classical music
in its stores to make customers feel like they’re part of an exclusive shopping
experience.
4. Taste: Taste has
a very strong influence on brand loyalty, underlining the importance of
thinking about adding a tasting element to your brand. Take McDonald's for example,
you will catch yourself with the special taste of their fried potato, which has
a special smell specifically prepared for McDonald's. And then they let you find
out how they use the same taste among different dishes to program your brain.
5. Sight: Sight is
easily the most stimulated of five senses sensory marketing experts use.
Customers can recognize well-designed logos and color schemes within a matter
of seconds. Color is a large component of sight, and brands like Coca-Cola have found
ways to use color to promote brand recognition for their products.
6. Emotion: Emotions
are playing into marketing more today than they ever have before. If you want
to make your customers believe in your brand, you’ve got to start by making an
emotional appeal. Brands like Airbnb do this beautifully, with their “Belong
Anywhere” campaign.
While getting to the bottom of
sensory marketing can seem complicated at first, the truth is that any brand
can take advantage of this simple marketing tactic. All you need to do is
figure out how to translate the critical characteristics of your brand into
compelling sensory experiences. I find this super interesting to do researches on
this topic and get such insights into this type of marketing, from the perspective
of an economics student. I tried to simplify all the researches findings to make
it as easy as possible for you guys in order to get a better grasp of what sensory
marketing is. Feel free to ask me and to discuss it with me if you have any questions.
