Sense and sensibility: how marketers can engage emotions and the five senses
Lena Roland
Warc
Smart Marketing, a two-day event hosted by the Neuromarketing Science & Business Association and held in London in December 2014, explored how an understanding of the way the human brain works can help marketers become more effective.
Charles Spence, professor of experimental psychology and head of the Crossmodal Research Laboratory at Oxford University, outlined how understanding the human mind can help marketers design better products and experiences by appealing to consumers' sensory touchpoints. Evidently brands are increasingly experimenting with neuromarketing and synaesthesia as a way to engage with consumers to provide richer brand experiences. Sound, smell, sight, touch and speech all play a part in this new neuro-centric world.
Engaging the senses
Sensory marketing is gaining traction. British Airways, for example, recently started offering its passengers music playlists to correspond with their cuisine; so those who order pasta can listen to Italian music, the aim of which is to enhance the in-flight dining experience. And The Fat Duck, Heston Blumenthal's renowned restaurant, provides restaurant-goers with soundtracks to complement their dining experience, a trend which has been picked up by other restaurateurs. In the FMCG sector, Häagen-Dazs, the ice-cream brand, is experimenting with sound by inviting consumers to download a "concerto timer" app that, when scanned with a special on-pack code, plays a Bach concerto for two minutes – the time it takes for the ice-cream to temper.
And Costa, the coffee shop retailer launched Costa Express vending machines in 2014 with the aim of engaging all five senses for a richer brand experience. The machines omit various aromas such as the smell of baked croissants and users can hear typical sounds of a coffee shop. "The world of sound can accentuate product elements" such as temperature and taste, Spence said.
Drinks brands appear to be early adopters of sensory marketing with Spence citing an experiment conducted by Diageo, the spirits brand, that looked at the perception of taste for its whisky brand, The Singleton. Consumers were invited to taste the whisky in three very different environments (a grass, wood and curvaceous-themed rooms) to establish if environment can have an impact on how a consumer perceives taste and flavour. Indeed the study found that a change of environment – different colours, smells, shapes – can enhance the experience of enjoying whisky by up to 20%. This research could have significant influence on the bar of the future.
The Singleton Sensorium from Condiment Junkie.
Further, Spence outlined research that associates certain shapes with particular tastes; angularity for example, is associated with bitter tasting food and drink such as beer and dark chocolate while round shapes suggest a sweeter taste. What's more, specific colours also connote particular tastes: red for example, is associated with sweet flavours. But what does all this mean for marketers? Shapes, Spence said, "can help brands communicate synaesthetically about the taste of the product".
The future of marketing is likely to consist of brands exploring more "signature smells" and "distinctive tastes", to boost engagement with consumers, Spence offered. In the personal care category for example, Lynx, the deodorant brand, is reportedly testing distinctive sounds for its spray mechanism. While some might regard this as a gimmick others would argue such features will help boost brand differentiation and aid brand recognition
What's more, packaging is vitally important to consumers' experience of a product and Spence explained how brand logos are used to "trigger engagement" and how many companies use their packaging to "communicate positive emotion". He noted the large number of brand logos – including Amazon, Danone and Kraft Foods – that feature a subtle smiling visual to promote engagement.
"The auditory branding community is getting much bigger and more confident," he noted, but retailers appear reticent to explore sensory marketing, at least for now. Slight changes to the retail space such as adding an element of sound or scent can provide shoppers with a richer brand experience but most retailers "just change the lighting", Spence said.
While sensory marketing does seem to be gaining traction one delegate feared that consumers will become too overwhelmed if their senses are engaged all the time – not everyone is a "sensory-junkie", Spence agreed, advising brands to take a "restrained approach". What's more, sensory marketing encourages the interplay of all five senses which can make marketing more effective, or if done carelessly, ineffective. As Spence put it: "all humans share universal crossmodal correspondence that can help or hinder marketing".
Engaging the emotions
Dr Robert Heath, associate professor of advertising theory at University of Bath School of Management, and author of Seducing the Subconscious: The psychology of emotional influence in Advertising, explained how advertising leverages the power of seduction. The human brain is a fascinating and complex organ and Heath ran through a handful of examples that illustrate this.
Can advertising sell a product that doesn't taste very nice? The answer appears to be yes. In 1990 Stella Artois, the beer brand, had just 4% awareness but had 45% rating in terms of quality. So it ran an advertising campaign positioning the brand as "Reassuringly Expensive" – the creative was based on the idea that drinkers would trade almost anything for a pint of Stella Artois. The campaign was "phenomenally successful" with Stella Artois becoming the biggest and most profitable beer brand in the UK within two years. Yet this was achieved despite the product's taste: when tested it wasn't very well liked (4 out of 5 people rejected it in blind testing), Heath pointed out. Moreover, the advert failed the link copy test. But the brand was able to grow by selling the perception of quality and superiority, Heath added. Was the campaign's success the result of advertising's art of persuasion or seduction?
So while the Stella Artois ad tested poorly in research but was successful in practice, other campaigns such as a 2003 advert for Citreon Xsara, the automotive brand, tested well in research but proved unsuccessful in practice. The ad featured Claudia Schiffer, the supermodel, doing a provocative strip-tease before driving off in the car. Although the ad had high recall, follow-up tests revealed women did not want to buy the car. "People are incredibly well equipped to pay attention to the attention-grabbing bit and not recall the rest", Heath explained. Part of the problem is that high-arousal situations can lead to the ultimate message – in this case affordability – being filtered out. Thus rather than associate the Citreon Xsara with affordability the female target audience feared the car imbued a negative connotations of women – they feared being perceived as "a tart", Heath said.
This indicates that advertising of the shocking or highly intense variety is less effective than the more subtle or subversive variety, the sort that "lulls you in" through more emotive content, Health explained.
It seems no neuromarketing event is complete these days without reference to Nobel Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman's theory on human brain activity. In his book Thinking Fast and Slow, Kahneman identifies two independent modes of brain activity: System 1 thinking is fast and driven by instinct and emotion while System 2 thinking is slow and rational. Heath's perhaps controversial contention is that advertising is rarely able to persuade – which involves tapping into System 2 (rational) thinking but it is able to seduce which involves the process of tapping into consumers' subconscious via emotive content (System 1).
Lena Roland is Warc's Knowledge Officer.
