Brands can leverage the power of the senses to connect to their customers on an emotional level, resulting in increased sales, improved customer loyalty and a stronger brand. This presentation shows you how to use sight, sound, touch, taste and smell to accomplish your goals and give you a competitive advantage.
2. What’s going on inside your customer’s
brain?
Sensory input comes in
at a rate of 11 million
bits of information per
second.
Our conscious brain can
only process at best, 40
bits of information per
second.
www.thinksensory.com
4. Appeal to the
Heart, Not the
Head
Most buying decisions are
based primarily on emotions,
not logic
• How does this
product, brand or
company make
the customer feel
• Features and
price need to
make sense, but
this is secondary
Examples:
Apple - “I feel hip”
Walt Disney - “I feel like a good parent”
Budweiser - “I feel manly, attractive and fun”
Nike – “I feel like a winner”
www.thinksensory.com
5. The Senses Are
the Gateway to
the Emotions
The most basic human
drives, food and sex, are
multi-sensory experiences.
www.thinksensory.com
6. Consumers were asked which of their senses where the most important when recognizing brands
Millward Brown and Martin Lindstrom, “BRAND Sense” (2005)
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
Sight Smell Sound Taste Touch
www.thinksensory.com
7. To Be a Successful Brand, First Cover the
Basics
• Don’t be a loser
– Have good values - Provide a good
quality product and customer service
– Get to know your customer - Make
sure your features and benefits are
important and relevant to your market
– Have self confidence, but not an over-
inflated ego - Price should be fair for
the value provided
www.thinksensory.com
8. Be Good Looking
• Investigate what colors and style appeal to your
target market, and use them for your logo and
throughout your marketing communications
• Don’t get carried away with cosmetics - Marketing
should be easy to read and understand, not just
pretty
• Packaging - Make sure that the way you present your
product is both attractive and practical (easy to use,
easy to transport, store & ship, etc.)
• Have a consistent brand image across all media and
customer touch points
www.thinksensory.com
9. Set the Mood with Sound
• Playing the right music can increase sales
up to 29%
• Music tempo influences how long customers
stay in a business establishment and how
quickly they move through it
Voices, music, sound effects and jingles
should be congruent with emotions you
want your product to arouse in the
customer (happy, excited, anxious,
relaxed, etc.) and with other sensory
input such as store décor, scent and
colors.
www.thinksensory.com
10. Touch the Customer
If you have a packaged product, investigate using
different textures and shapes on your packaging to
stand out
In luxury goods, people
associate weight with quality.
In retail, the more people are
able to touch, hold and
interact with the product, the
more likely they are to buy it
www.thinksensory.com
11. Be Delicious
When taste
sampling is not
possible or for
non-food
products, a good
substitute is
scent; 80% of
what we perceive
as flavor is the
fragrance and
only 20% is
actually taste
If you have a
food product or
restaurant, give
out free samples
– A third of
people who
sampled a
product
bought it in the
same shopping
trip and over
half of
purchasers
said they
would buy the
sampled
product again www.thinksensory.com
12. Connect with ScentConnect with Scent
• Scent is the only
sense that goes
directly to the
emotional and
memory centers of
the brain
• It works to:
– Increase sales
– Improve customer
perception of
product quality
– Increase time and
money spent
– Increase the amount
customers are
willing to pay
www.thinksensory.com
13. hippocampus
Why the sense of smell is so powerful
“With all of the other
senses, you think
before you respond,
but with scent, your
brain responds
before you think.”
(Vlahos, 2007)
Smell is directly
connected to the
emotional & memory
centers of the brain. (Herz
2002)
Scent marketing can be
effective even when it is
under the conscious level
of awareness. (Li, et al. 2007)
www.thinksensory.com
14. 75% of emotions are
generated by smell.
(Bell and Bell 2007)
We are 100 times more
likely to remember
something that we smell
than something that we
see, hear or touch.
(Vlahos 2007)
Scent touches us in lasting ways
www.thinksensory.com
15. Scent boosts sales
Grocery - sales
tripled when
ambient scent was
added.
Restaurant - 15%
more time and 20%
more money spent in
a scented
environment versus
non-scented.
Retail clothing store -
sales almost doubled
on days when a scent
was used.
www.thinksensory.com
16. Tips for A Lasting Relationship
1. Once you have enticed customers
into trying your product or service,
continue to use these sensory
tactics to remain top-of-mind and
strengthen your brand’s
relationship with them
2. Keep customers’ interest by asking
their opinions and involving them
in company sponsored promotions
and projects
3. Don’t get complacent; keep
showing them you care
You can build relationships that last a
lifetime! www.thinksensory.com
17. Thinksensory is a sensory marketing firm focused on
generating positive ROI for clients through:
• Increasing sales
• Increasing the total amount spent per visit
• Boosting the total number of items bought per visit
• Highlighting higher margin products, promotions and
seasonal items
• Encouraging repeat visits and purchases
• Improving customer loyalty, referrals, reviews and
recommendations to others
• Strengthening your brand
• Making it more memorable
• Associating it with positive emotions
www.thinksensory.com
18. What are you waiting for? It’s time to
• World-renowned sensory marketing expert, quoted
in Bloomberg Businessweek, Advertising Age,
AdWeek, Forbes and many other media
• Scientifically proven methodologies tailored to your
real world business
• Our systems are risk-free. We are the only sensory
marketing company that guarantees ROI.
www.thinksensory.com
Editor's Notes
What happens to all the excess information that the conscious brain can’t process? It goes into the subsconscious.
The vast majority of the information that customers use to make a buying decision is based on sensory input, memories and non-conscious associations.
According to Harvard marketing professor and author Gerald Zaltman, “95% of our thoughts, emotions, and learning occur without our conscious awareness.” According to A.K. Padeep, author of The Buying Brain and CEO of Neurofocus, it is closer to 99.999%.
Just a note: Dr. Pradeep is one of the keynote speakers at our upcoming ScentWorld conference, so if you want to learn more about neuromarketing and sensory marketing, I urge you to come (more on that later).
Your sense of space, movement, speech, problem solving, vision and hearing are processed in the neocortex. Of the senses, only olfaction is processed in the limbic system.
The olfactory bulb is directly connected to the limbic system and to the amygdala, the structure that processes emotion. It is also strongly connected to the hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for memory and associated learning. (Herz 2002)
“With all of the other senses, you think before you respond, but with scent, your brain responds before you think.” (Vlahos, 2007)
Because there is no thinking necessary and consumers do not perceive the scent as being a marketing tactic, scent marketing can be effective even when it is under the conscious level of awareness. (Li, et al. 2007)
So here’s a bride sniffing her bouquet. What do you think she will feel and think of every time she smells roses for the rest of her life?
When the aroma of fresh baked bread was dispersed in a grocery store, sales in the bakery section tripled.
Scent in a casino proved to increase gambling revenue by 45%.
At a restaurant, patrons spent 15% more time and 20% more money in a scented environment versus non-scented.
In a clothing store, sales almost doubled on days when a gender-specific scent was used.