Is an application of the understanding of sensation and perception to the field of marketing

Sukhman Singh Bhatia

Sukhman Singh Bhatia

Customer Success Associate at INDmoney.com

Published Aug 27, 2019

Sensory Marketing has been defined as "marketing that engages the customer's senses and affect their thinking,judgement,and their behaviour."In other words sensory marketing is an application of the understanding of sensation and perception to the field of marketing.All five senses may be involved with this type of marketing : vision,sound,smell,taste and touch.

Marketers certainly appreciate the importance of sensory marketing.Many hotels,retailers and other service establishments use signature scents to set a mood and to make themselves different from the other.Westin's White Tea scent was so popular that they started selling it for home use as well.On the other hand NBC,Intel and Yahoo! have their brand jingles trademarked.Harley Davidson was another company which was unable to trademark its distinctive engine roar.In packing of their product they try to find different shapes that are pleasing to touch and the food shown in advertising both visuals and verbals depiction try to play with the customer's taste buds.

Now let us know about the five senses that the company uses as in their Sensory Marketing:

TOUCH

Touch is the first sense to develop and the last sense to develop and the last sense we lose with age.People vary in their need for touch,and Peck and Childers have developed a scale to capture those differences.Written product description helped alleviate the NFT'S level of frustration,though only for more concrete product attributes (such as the weight of a cell phone).

SMELL

Scent-encoded information has been shown to be more durable and last longer in memory that information encoded with other sensory cues.People can recognize scents after very long lapses of time,and using scents as reminders as reminders can cue all kind of autobiographical memories.Pleasant scents have also been show to enhance evaluations of products and stores.Consumers also take time doing shopping and engage in more variety just because of the pleasant scents.

SOUND

Marketing communication is by far the very often auditory in nature.Even the sounds that make up the word can carry meaning.Languages too can have its own importance.Ambient music in the store has also been shown to influence consumer mood,time spent in a store,and the consumer spending.

TASTE

Humans can identify only 5 pure tastes:sweet,salty,sour,bitter and umami,Umami comes from a japanese food researcher which means "delicious".Taste perception themselves depends upon the other factors--the way food looks,feel,smell,and sound to eat.thus many factors affects taste perceptions including physical attributes,brand name,product information.

VISION

Visual effects have been studied in detail in advertising context.Many visual illusion exist in day-to-day consumer behaviour. For example:people judge tall thin containers to contain more volume than short fat ones,but after drinking people get to know that they consumed more from short fat container as compared to tall thin container,over-adjusting their expectation.