Print Power Austria

What is sensory marketing and
Date: September 2007
Author: Charles Spence,
how does it work?
head of the Crossmodal
Research Laboratory,
University of Oxford
There’s new science about how people perceive products – and get the right sensory touch
and you could be a winner, says Charles Spence.
As humans we are sentient beings, but the exact role of the senses in how we perceive the
world has remained something of a mystery up to now. However, in recent years, scientists
have started to understand the way the five senses interact with one another in the brain to
influence our perception of everything from the food on our plate to the environments in
which we live and work.
Their research reveals that you cannot predict how a person will perceive/respond to a
product by studying how they respond to each sense in isolation. Instead, it’s imperative
that you consider the overall multi-sensory impression (or Gestalt) created by a product.
The power of multi-sensory marketing
This finding has huge implications for businesses. Get the combination of multi-sensory
cues correct (what we call congruent) and it brings dramatic benefits. Add the right
fragrance (ie smell) to a fabric conditioner and clothes will ‘feel’ softer. Add a ‘clean’ smell
and whites may even appear ‘whiter’.
A product’s fragrance can appear 30% more intense if the consumer’s other senses
are also stimulated, and food and drink will taste more than 10% sweeter when given a
suitable colouring.
French research recently showed that even expert wine tasters can be fooled into thinking
they’re drinking red wine, simply by adding colouring to white wine. Such discoveries are
leading companies to develop packaging with multi-sensory appeal. For example, wrapping
for Hovis crustless bread is now coated with a soft-touch lacquer, to echo the softness of
the product.
Pandering to the sense of touch is important – the skin is our largest sense organ.
Companies that fail to consider this aspect do so at their peril, given claims that we live in a
‘touch-hungry’ society. Adding a specific smell to a new car can work wonders – even for
the most expensive cars – especially when it mimics the aromatic blend of leather and
wood in a 1965 Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud.
Consumer electronics makers have also jumped on the bandwagon. Sony Ericsson has
introduced a range of scented mobile phones that stimulate people’s sense of smell while
they talk. Another company perfumes its packaging to mask any smells that might make
people think the product had been on the shelf for some time.
Sound, too, is important in shaping consumer expectations. Why else are crisps so often
sold in noisy packets? And most Japanese car manufacturers have, for years, recognised one
key selling point – the sound a car door makes when it closes.
Sensory signatures and brand recognition
In the past, people working in the creative industries discovered the multi-sensory
phenomena through sheer serendipity. But with psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists
now uncovering the fundamental rules underlying multi-sensory perception, there is a real
opportunity for manufacturers to develop ‘signature’ sensory attributes that can be
uniquely associated with their brand.
Companies have, for years, tried to protect their ‘brand’ colours – think of the T-Mobile pink
or Kodak yellow. Product sounds (or ‘signature sounds’) are also often strongly associated
with a particular product. Harley-Davidson has gone to great lengths to try to patent the
sound of its motorcycle engines. Beer manufacturers are trying to vary the hiss of cans as
they are opened.
It won’t be long before companies start mass-producing products and packaging that have
a ‘signature feel’ and/or ‘signature smell’. BA has already experimented with a signature
scent, ‘Meadow Grass’, released in all its executive lounges in airports worldwide.
Marketers are now using multi-sensory appeal. One perfume has ‘I sense therefore I am’ as
a strapline. Unilever has released five new Magnum ice creams, each one targeted at a
different sense. Tourist boards are doing the same. You can ‘Come to your senses in
Helsinki’, and holidays in Scotland promise that you will not only ‘see it’, but also ‘hear it’,
feel it’ and even ‘smell it’.
Increasingly, brand owners are trying to create emotional attachments for their products in
the minds of their consumers. Traditional media (TV and radio) are fundamentally limited in
this regard: hearing and vision are rational senses and have a very weak link to the
emotional centres of the brain.
The challenge is to stimulate a consumer’s more emotional senses, such as touch, smell,
and taste (which have direct links to the emotional centres in the brain). This is one of the
reasons why advertisers and marketers are looking at ways to include a ‘synaesthetic’
element in their advertising.
Stimulating customers’ perceptions
Synaesthesia is the name for the fascinating mixing of the senses experienced by a small
number of people. One of the most common forms is when the sight or sound of a number,
letter or musical note induces the perception of a colour. Some ads have tried to elicit such
cross-sensory perceptions by using synaesthetic metaphors.
Take the slogan for Skittles: ‘Taste the rainbow’, or Honda’s TV ads, with the strapline, ‘this
is what a Honda feels like’, illustrated by a choir making engine sounds. The synaesthetic
approach enables advertisers to go beyond the limitations associated with only being able
to stimulate a potential customer’s eyes and ears. A well-designed Gestalt can work
wonders for a product. But get the components wrong, or neglect one sensory impression
and the result can be disastrous.
With Tab, the drink released by Coca-Cola some years ago, it was the incongruency of
multi-sensory cues that led to its downfall. People expect a cola to be a dark colour; trying
to sell one as clear as lemonade will confound customer expectations. Looking to the
future, cultural factors are becoming increasingly important, because companies now
operate in a global marketplace.
Cultural and age considerations
What is congruent in multi-sensory terms can vary from country to country. While British
people associate the smell of cucumber with dark green, the Spanish match it with a bright
red (they associate it with gazpacho soup, which contains cucumber and tomatoes).
The smell of a lemon is strongly associated with yellow in England, but many South
Americans only ever see green lemons. Adding a drop of sugar on the tongue leads Western
consumers to rate an almond smell as being 30% more intense than if a drop of salt is
placed on their tongue instead. The opposite is true for Japanese consumers.
Another challenge is to create multi-sensory products for an ageing population. As people
start to live well past the age of 60 or 70, they face reduced tactile, olfactory, and gustatory
sensitivity. While hearing aids and spectacles can correct the loss of hearing and vision,
there is currently nothing that can tackle the loss of our other, more emotional, senses.
Product designers and innovators will need to take account of our growing understanding of
the rules of multi-sensory perception. This will help them to create novel products and
environments that can better stimulate the senses of the rapidly-growing number of older
consumers.
Professor Charles Spence is head of the Crossmodal Research Laboratory at the Department of Experimental
Psychology, University of Oxford.
This article first appeared in Contact magazine on 1 September 2007.

Download Report