Advertising and marketing communities have clamored for our auditory attention on the radio; they have directed our visual attention to store shelves, billboards and television. In the United States, an average child is exposed to more than 30,000 television commercials a year; the average adult to approximately 86,500. In recent years, advertisers and marketing communities have used sensory branding to bombard our other senses of smell, taste and touch, luring us into trying over 1,000 new brands each year.

Researchers understand that the human brain rarely processes sensory input in isolation. Advertisers and marketers understand that consumers are most receptive to a product when that product appeals to and engages consumers’ multiple senses.

“We store our values, feelings and emotions in memory banks,” says Martin Lindstrom, author of Brand Sense: Build Powerful Brands through Touch, Taste, Smell, Sight, and Sound. “The human being has at least five tracks—image, sound, smell, taste and touch that contain more data than one can imagine because they have direct bearing on our emotions. They can fast forward or backtrack at will.”
Our senses help us understand the world around us. Our senses trigger memories and memories influence our emotions. Our sense of smell evokes the strongest of emotions and is the sense most closely linked to memory because it is hard wired to our brains. Seventy-five percent of our emotions are generated by what we smell. Emotions influence behavior – consumer behavior in the global marketplace.

Sensory branding includes the standardized ambience of what customers see (e.g., size, layout, color of lights, staff uniform), what customers hear (e.g., type of music or sound, volume), scents customers smell and where (e.g., in the air, on tissue paper, bags or receipts), what customers taste and what customers touch.

Sensory branding makes its impact each time customers engage with or react to a company’s product or service. By employing scent, sound and material textures in immersive customer experiences, marketers build strong connections with their customers and drive preference for their brands. Sensory branding drives customer satisfaction, but few organizations actually conduct market research or customer surveys to determine the extent of cause and effect.

What appeals to one customer may not appeal to another. An individual might react adversely to a scent by itself, but respond favorably to the same scent when it is used in combination with a particular sound, texture or taste. Customer surveys are adept at teasing out subtle nuances in perception and subsequent interpretation through consumer behavior. Which of the five senses were stimulated? Which messages resonated with customers? What were subsequent customer behaviors?

Customers at Celebration Health, Florida’s Hospitals’ healthcare facility, were cancelling MRI’s in record numbers, resulting in significant revenue loss. Employing strategies in sensory branding, Celebration Health renamed their MRI department ‘Seaside Imaging’, painted beach murals on the walls and added folding lounge chairs. They transformed the MRI machine into a sand castle. Scent Air provided Coconut Beach and Ocean scents. A 50% reduction in cancellations resulted.

Samsung, the consumer electronics giant, pumps a scent smelling like honeydew melon from the ceiling of its retail spaces prompting one visitor to observe, “I love the smell of technology. It smells stimulating.”

Kellogg’s spent years studying the relationship between crunchiness and taste, before patenting the crunch of their cereal. Consumers enjoy every “Snap, Crackle and Pop”, part of the Kellogg’s brand based on auditory stimuli, taste and texture.

“Far from being a practice limited to the few, today multi-sensory merchandising stimulation and sensory branding are separating best practice from good. It is a science. It can be unique to your stores. It can create sub-conscious and unconscious stimulation, suggestion and memory reinforcement and retrieval that are part of your brand DNA, and an important driver of productive outcomes for your business,” observes Peter James Ryan, chief executive navigator, Red Communication.

Some sensory branding campaigns have spinoff products or services. The Westin Hotel chain has a worldwide Sensory Welcome program. A customized soundtrack creates a relaxed mood in the hotels’ public spaces, blending with infused scent and interior design. The company’s White Tea fragrance became so popular it is now sold through the company’s in-room catalogue, its branded website, and in Nordstrom department stores.

The impact of marketing through sensory branding can be measured at every step of the customer relationship. Internally, employee surveys measure the level of employee engagement in the process of sensory branding initiatives. Which marketing managers and operational staff have authority to act on specific aspects of the sensory brand? What organizational structure best supports project teams? How are teams trained and motivated? What are the implications for organizational design – for the communication and coordination among operating groups and implementation teams?

Assessing customer satisfaction or employee satisfaction with various aspects of sensory branding helps inform existing and future business decisions. Have you identified the impact that sensory branding has on your return on investment?

If you would like to learn more about how SSO can help you identify outcomes and be more productive, contact us now at 1-800-756-6168.

Dr. Jan Stringer West, Ph.D.
Research Associate
Survey Software Online

There is a clash of the titans going on in the Web-based applications arena. In the blue corner, from Redmond, Washington, the veteran multi-national computer software behemoth Microsoft. In the red corner, from Menlo Park, California, the Sultan of Search Engines, Google. The two have been trading punches for the past few years and the fight is just getting started.

The Microsoft versus Google battle features two companies approaching the Web-based applications market from completely different directions. Bill Gates and Microsoft built its empire on desktop applications running on local PCs, while Google conquered the online search and advertising markets. As Microsoft tries to grab a slice of Google’s search business, Google has been counter-punching by going behind the firewall of Microsoft. What lies ahead is a day where the Internet and browsers, instead of a computer’s operating system, may be the foundation for application development.

Watching Microsoft and Google slug it out for world domination of the computer industry has significant implications, pushing technology to the limit in a race for supremacy. Over the past few years Web-based applications, or Webapps, have been establishing themselves as the preferred platform for business information systems and other critical applications. They are part of the Web 2.0 generation, where websites allow users to do more than just retrieve information. They house the ability to access interactive facilities, allowing users to run software applications entirely through a browser.

"We're on the cusp of the next generation, the next revolution in computing," Matthew Glotzbach, product management director for Google, recently said. "We're really being ushered into the era of cloud computing."

“Cloud computing” refers to applications and data stored online and accessible from any device with a Web browser. Browser-based software never requires installation processes or hard drive space because it lives in the virtual cloud on the Internet. And whenever you launch it, you always have access to the latest version, unless the Internet connection at your local Starbucks isn’t working.

The blog you’re reading now is posted on Survey Software Online (“SSO”), a complete Web-based user interface and communication platform that enables business professionals to effectively create, deploy and report the results of surveys.

Web-based applications like SSO combine the communication capabilities of the Internet with software resident in the “internet cloud”. A Web-based application is a program that resides entirely on the Internet as a multi-user, cross-platform application that allows many users to work from it at any one moment in time. The many advantages of using this technology are beginning to win over the computing populous.

One of the biggest advantages of Webapps is accessibility. Since applications like the SSO app are based on the Internet, users anywhere in the world can access them.

Plus, the constant updating and that annoying “network administrator” have been zapped by Webapps. Instead of every user having to download patches for their operating system, which seems like a weekly process, patches and upgrades are applied to the Webapp server so it has no impact on the user. The network administrator, who blocks every bit of software you try to install on your system, is bypassed through Webapps.

It may seem that Web applications spell trouble for software makers, and to some degree they do. But software vendors are adjusting to the times. Webapps opens a wider market for software vendors, who aren’t constrained by having to write code around a specific hardware platform and limit their market or incur additional costs to build for another platform. Many bugs and computer viruses are squashed in Web-based applications because no union is necessary between the Webapp and the local computers operating system, which can be rife with problems.

Webapps make the Green movement giddy. With software boxes, printed manuals, shipping costs, CD’s, and all the environmental consequences involved to distribute software, Webapps are both economically and environmentally friendly. Furthermore, Webapps eliminate the entire software piracy issue with one click of the mouse, leaving the U.S. government time to focus on those high-seas Somali pirates instead.

Web-based applications, because they are developed on open source platforms and supported online, provide cost-effective solutions. Webapps work any where, any place, any time, and even conquer the Mac vs. Windows issue, which, of course, is a whole other battle of the titans.

Dr. Jan Stringer, Ph.D.
Research Associate
Survey Software Online