Further exploring sensory marketing
More information about sensory marketing
Consumer expectations are ever higher: they have access to vast amounts of information, available in real time and exhaustive. They have extensive choice and have become more demanding than ever. The product alone is no longer enough. Shops and restaurants must reinvent themselves to remain attractive.
The SICC acronym describes shopper expectations during their shopping experience:
- Customers want bespoke products. They want to feel that the shop they are entering is made for them.
- The experience must be immersive as soon as they enter and allow them to leave their daily concerns at the threshold of the shop.
- The buying experience must also connect them to their community. The Apple and Decathlon City brands are exemplary in this respect. They provide schedules of activities, which are often free, on themes that enable geeks, yoga and running fans to meet and come together around their shared passion.
- These customers no longer want to experience any pain points during their buying experience. They are looking for convenience, i.e., everything retailers put in place to facilitate their experience and free them from chores like queues, fittings, deliveries, time at the till, etc.
Sensory marketing is a strategic positioning tool for brands and retailers in general. It enables them to strengthen the identity of a product or service and to create an attachment and gain the loyalty of their customers.
Retailers have been using sensory techniques for a long time to create a pleasant atmosphere in their shops (affective function).
What’s new is that professionals are now:
- Using the cognitive function of sensory elements. They inform the public about the brand or the shop;
- To create a structured and coherent whole from the stimuli.
How do we operate?
We have five “neurophysiological” senses: touch, sight, hearing, smell and taste. In addition to the five traditional senses, there are also five “psychophysiological senses”. Every human being (and every buyer) has their own way of understanding the world around them through their five senses. There are three categories of people:
- “Visual”
- “Auditory”
- “Kinaesthetic”.
Kinaesthetic people rely more on touch in their communication process. By extension, people overuse their smell/taste, which engages the body.
Therefore, the diversity of the group and the benefits of sensory marketing to communicate messages and engage consumers is understood as broadly as possible.
Therefore, the diversity of the group and the benefits of sensory marketing to communicate messages and engage consumers is understood as broadly as possible.
A large majority of the population is primarily sensitive to visual and sound stimuli. These two senses are used everywhere and by everyone in both the online and off-line customer journey.
In order to implement a memorable sensory approach, it’s best to put stimuli in place via “differentiators” (tactile, taste and olfactory).
A study by Synesthetics, Inc. demonstrated that the impact of an event increases by 70% when three senses are involved simultaneously. It’s easy to conclude that this is also the case for a sales or consumption location.
Events communication is also inspired by sensory marketing
Storytelling (or narrative communication) is used to tell a story for marketing purposes. Storytelling captures people’s attention and creates emotion by using real stories (foundation myth or company creation) or by creating more-or-less fictional stories related to the brand and/or service. This is quite a powerful tool which entails emotional engagement, if the recipient of the message is open to it.
Storyliving, adds physical engagement, a brand-consumer interaction. In this case the brand provides content which enables the consumer to live a unique experience with it. The types of content used most frequently include making-ofs, interviews, tutorials and original live videos. Storyliving can also provide the public with a virtual reality experience. This is facilitated by the explosion in social network use. It can be as simple as a shop asking the community to choose:
- The next “after-work” theme on Facebook
- The preferred display window style for the sales season on Twitter...
