Senses trigger strong emotions and memories in us. Brands know this and they exploit it to their advantage, it is called “Sensory Marketing”.
Sensual experience + creation of desire = product purchase
This is a marketing method that aims to entice the consumer and appeal to their senses. Sensory marketing stimulates feelings and makes us believe we need the product for sale.
Sensory Marketing for small brands
Create the desire
Consider your brand and how it appeals to each of the five senses. Depending on what you’re selling the senses will take a different priority. Flowers will appeal to sight and smell, clothing to touch and sight, food and drink to taste and sight, music to hearing – note how sight appears in the majority of our sensory perceptions.
How to make sensory marketing work harder for your brand
Let’s imagine your brand is a furniture brand. You need to appeal to the customer’s senses of sight, touch and smell. We want to see furniture that looks good, is pleasing to the touch and smells of wood or furniture polish. So how do you use the power of the senses to transmit the desire for a new piece of furniture to enhance the customer’s home into a high-end sale?
The important factor is to consider the message you want to get across and how you are going to convey that sensory message to your target audience.
Video is another powerful way to appeal to the senses. This is why property companies give tours of home interiors, holiday companies show clips of the local area and many companies use tutorials to show how a product works. YouTube is an increasingly popular marketing method that many smaller brands can use to promote. It’s free, easy to use and can demonstrate the ‘live’ product, which can sometimes do much more than a simple copy on a page.
The benefits of sensory marketing
To bring your brand to life it needs to create the right sensory experience and draw on the senses of the potential customer. Successful sensory marketing can induce:
- Brand loyalty – ‘I like the taste of those biscuits so I’ll try the brand of chocolate next’
- An immediate sale – ‘I’ll buy it now as it feels and smells good’
- A positive experience – ‘this company appeals to me so I’ll buy more of their products’
By using sensory marketing for your brand you can create a subconscious influence to engage and inspire. Consider the simple fact that if your brand appeals to three senses rather than just one you are three times more likely to make a sale. We live in a multi-sensory world and brands can use this to grow their market share and increase awareness.
