How To Use Sensory Marketing Tactics

To Create Irresistible Brands

Relevant topics Strategy, Archive

Neuromarketing Principle:
Sometimes, a products surface or packaging feels dierent in your hands than what your
eyes would expect. This works wonders for brands with an exciting personality, but not for
brands associated with a sincere personality.
Application:
In case of sincere brands: align sight and touch (sensory match). For exciting brands: unalign
sight and touch (sensory mismatch).

In todays day and age, the most successful brands are the ones that deliver feelings and
emotions. By stimulating senses (like sight, hearing, taste), emotions will be delivered and learning
will be stimulated. This is very eective, because our senses are directly linked to the limbic part
of our brain that is responsible for memories, feelings, pleasure and emotions.

When a brand tickles multiple senses, we will experience the brand more profoundly and connect
with it on a deeper emotional level. Sensory branding is a type of marketing that appeals to all the
senses in relation to the brand. This article gives you guidelines to successfully implement
sensory marketing for your brand.

Human Senses Can Get Fooled

The main use for sensory branding is to appeal to your customers senses: sight, smell, sound,
taste and touch. To understand sensory marketing, its important to know a bit more about how
perception and consumption relate.

Most products, at the minimum, incorporate visual and haptic information,

and do so in temporal order i.e. consumers rst see a product and then they subsequently
interact with the product through touch. Such cross-modal perceptions need not align and
indeed
may often conict, for example between smell and taste or touch and sound. You can think of a
bottle that looks like glass, but actually feels like plastic. Or a cookie that smells sweet, but tastes
salty.

In sensory marketing, expectation is the driver of success. The rst glimpse of a product will set
expectations of the form, the material, the smell. If these expectations do not come true (the
expectation does not match your sensory input), you will be surprised by this sensory mismatch.
This has an impact on the product experience: when the experience with the product exceeds
the expectation, consumers will often evaluate the experience as positive, if the interaction falls
short the experience will often be viewed as negative.

Brand Personality: Sincere Vs Exciting Brands

In the light of brand perception, sensory mismatch also has an inuence on the brand evaluation.
Consumers form an image of a brand personality when they interact with a brand. By giving a
brand human-like characteristics, consumers create and sustain an intimate relationship with a
brand.

In general, consumers form stronger relationships with sincere brands (like Hallmark, Volvo,
Coca-Cola) than with exciting brands (Apple, MTV). In essence, a brands personality inuences
how its actions and behaviors are perceived by the customer. These actions can be derived from
consumer reviews, advertising, past experience and of particular interest of this article, how the
product looks.

Does Sensory Surprise Work? Its A Matter Of Brand

Personality
Sundar & Noseworthy (2016) researched the eects of brand personality on sensory mismatch.
They tested consumption of products that were visually aligned with how they feel (sensory
match: a bag of coee that both looks and feels like burlap) and that were visually not aligned
with how they feel (sensory mismatch: a bag of coee that looks like burlap but feels like paper).
They found that consumers intuitively link sensory mismatch to a brands personality.

You would think that when the mismatch is negative (the material from a dress looks like silk, but
in reality its made of cotton), a consumer should have a negative evaluation about the product.
But this is not always the case. In case of an exciting brand, the mismatch will sometimes be
perceived positively. This is because consumers view the mismatch as more authentic of the
exciting personality of the brand. Sensory match (touch and sight are aligned) is more preferred
for sincere brands, because the match is seen as more authentic of a sincere personality. This
shows that the success of a given sensory marketing tactic highly depends on how consumers
perceive the brand.

Sincere brand personality - touch and sight aligned - sensory match.

Exciting brand personality - touch and sight unaligned - sensory mismatch

How To Apply This?

As a brand manager its important to know that the packaging of your product and your products
materials not only inuences consumption decisions but also brand perception and brand
evaluation. Depending on your brand personality, you could choose to surprise your customer (in
case of an exciting brand) or to make sure your packaging leaves nothing to the imagination
(sincere brand).

Sincere Brands
Examples of sincere brands: Volvo, Coca-Cola, Hallmark
Align actions to your brand personality:
Down-to-earth
Honest
Wholesome
Cheerful
Align how the product looks with how it feels (A metal looking phone bumper shouldnt feel
like plastic)
Example Case: A Smell Of Herbal Essences
Herbal Essences is an example of a sincere brand. Their brand promise is to Take your hair to
paradise- hair that smells as good as it feels. In their advertisements they refer to the delicious
smells of their shampoos. You see owers, coconuts, fresh colours and limes. To make their
brand promise true, they really need to align the smell of their products to this ad and the
product packaging. They need to make sure their shampoo smells fresh (like paradise) when
customers are using the product.

Exciting Brands
Examples of exciting brands: Apple, MTV, Coolblue
Align actions to your brand personality:
Daring
Spirited
Imaginative
Up-to-date
Surprise the customer: unalign how the product looks and feels:
Positive mismatch (a phone bumper that looks like plastic but has an aluminum nish
that feels heavy)
Negative mismatch (a phone bumper that looks like plastic, but has a glass nish that
feels fragile)

Example Case: BMW

BMW, the ultimate driving machine. An example of an exciting brand. BMW creates driving
pleasure from the perfect combination of dynamic, sporty performance, ground-breaking
innovations and breath-taking design. An exciting brand as BMW would benet from sensory
 mismatch. With the BMWi they introduced a car that uses green energy. A car that from the
outside looks very dierent from the other BMW cars. The expectation from consumers could be
critical I hope this doesnt undermine the sporty performance of BMW. To create a positive
sensory mismatch BMW should make sure this car drives as sporty as the other BMW cars.

Reference:
Sundar, A., & Noseworthy, T. J.
(2016). Too Exciting to Fail, Too
Sincere to Succeed: The Eects of
Brand Personality on Sensory
Disconrmation. Journal of
Consumer Research, 43(1), 44-67.

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Written by Marijn Keizer-Keijzer on Monday, 20 June 2016.

Further Reading

The Denitive Guide To Scent Marketing

 Smell. Isnt it amazing how a dash of invisible scent molecules is able to transport you right
back into a childhood visit to your grandparents? Or how the delicious aroma of freshly
baked bread seems to lure you into that little bakery around the corner despite your strict
low-carb diet? And everyone recognizes that typical smell emanating from the box of your
brand-new phone or television.

READ MORE

Posted in Strategy, Archive published on Tuesday, 03 May 2016

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