What Is Sensory Marketing?

The sensory marketing appeals to the senses with the aim of creating sensory experiences through sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell. It is also known as multisensory marketing since it is often oriented to a combination of senses, which are mainly sight, hearing, and smell.

It is about getting the act of purchase to become a time of comfort and sensory pleasure that permeates the client’s conscience puts him in a good mood and gets him to enjoy the shopping experience. This not only leads to greater consumption but also a higher rate of return to the store (repeat purchase), loyalty and brand linkage.

Here Some topics about Sensory Marketing

Sensations and emotions

People can be understood as a binomial between reason and emotion. As Tim Pethick, marketing expert, states, “the reason is guided, but the emotions decide”. We often try to convince our clients with rational arguments (price, benefits, etc.), and we must bear in mind that the emotional impact of a packaging (touch, color …) or an establishment (smells, sounds, colors …) it rivals to a great extent with its rational impact (the information it contains, the benefit it promises). What Is Sensory Marketing?

By different paths

The information about our environment reaches our consciousness entering through the five sensory doors and can also remain in our mind and return to be reexperienced thanks to memory, since we can remember things we have seen, heard, touched, tasted and smelled and re-experience the sensations that produced us. The sensory impacts generate a memory linked to emotions.

The sensory marketing information reaches our consciousness in different ways activating different combinations of the limbic system, the cerebral cortex, and the tonsils, among other organs. There are some companies that are already capable of conducting market research to determine the physiological reactions that customers experience when exposed to visual, auditory and olfactory sensory stimuli ( see, for example, Hamilton Research ). However, market research nowadays has mechanisms that are still very rudimentary, although they are capable of achieving some significant results.

A music of noses

Among the five senses, various scientific studies show that smell is one of the most impactful. M. Gobé states in his book Emotional Branding: The New Paradigm for Connecting Brands to People, that companies that use olfactory strategies in their stores can increase their billing by 40 percent. This video talks about it. In Spain proliferate companies that are dedicated to creating corporate essences, that is, essences designed to become the fragrance associated with a brand. Homosapien, fresh aroma or Odotype are some of them.

In recent years there have been other brands that have also created their own corporate fragrance, such as hotel chains (NH, AC …) and clothing chains, such as Zara.

The ear is another of the most powerful senses to deploy a sensory marketing strategy, focused on creating a better and more memorable shopping experience. The Abercrombie & Fitch clothing stores are famous for using not only a characteristic fragrance in their establishments but also a strategy based on music that can be heard in them.

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Natura stores are also famous, which perfectly combine the use of new age music with aromas of different natures to create an own and differential consumption experience. But even spaces like Leroy Merlin are betting on the combination of elements that take into account and stimulate the different senses to create a truly special shopping experience.

Logos, prototypes, and monotypes

So, as we see, sensory marketing cares about the client’s senses, and tries to improve their experience in our establishment, and also their experience with the use of our products and services. An investment in sensory strategy can achieve a multiplication of our turnover, whether we deploy it on our establishments or on the packaging of our products. What Is Sensory Marketing?

Is it nice to walk through our stores? (touch and hearing). Are the tables and chairs of our establishments pleasant when we sit on them? (touch). Do we have the correct temperature or have we had air conditioning? (touch). Do colors and decoration invite vitality or introspection? (view). Do we have the right lighting in our restaurant or our jewelry? (view). Should music play in our stores? And what kind of music? (ear). Does that practical music really respond to our brand strategy and positioning? Do you invite our clients to stay or go running?

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Let’s not forget that EVERYTHING communicates. The logo that we have all assumed as necessary may be too much alone carrying the full weight of the brand image. A corporate aroma ( prototype ) could help you improve brand perception, and a sound mark ( monotype ) could help us to define much better what the customer perceives of us and would support the rest of our communication.

We are in a mobile, tactile and multisensory world. Those who best play with their chips will generate differential and superior positioning.