SENSORY MARKETING

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.