Nowadays, the binary digital information produced by the combination of 0 and 1 permeates every corner of our life. Rationality and hardness seem to have the upper hand, but we do not treat our senses. From the gradual coverage of facial values and sales to the spread of the image of the quadratic dimension and cubic dimension, the pursuit of sensory satisfaction has become just needed.
In fact, over the past two decades, marketers and scholars in Europe and the United States have come to understand the powerful role of unconscious stimulation, and have been exploring how to use the senses to impress consumers. For example, high-end restaurants offer a variety of exquisite goblets, because drinking red wine with a goblet is more delicious than drinking with a water goblet, and advertising a cake with a shiny fork on the right is more attractive than advertising without a fork.
In recent years, many new researches revolve around a new field of psychology, embodied cognition. Embodied cognition refers to the strong connection between physical experience and mental state. Physical experience can "activate" psychological feelings and affect our various decisions. According to Yale and Colorado professors, people with hot drinks are more likely to think strangers are friendly than those with cold drinks, and people are more likely to conform in a warm environment.
A large number of companies have already begun to use sensory to influence our decision making to carry out sensory marketing. Its marketing activities are mainly aimed at the visual and auditory sense of consumers, because visual and auditory sense is the main channel for us to receive information; and the use of touch and smell is less. Nowadays, with the continuous refinement and deepening of marketing means, the unique sense of smell and touch will become the resources that marketers can dig deeply. This is because the sense of smell is always open, we can easily close our eyes or shift our eyes to avoid visual advertising information, and the sense of smell can not be actively closed. Tactile sensation can trigger consumer cravings. Anouk Festjens, a PhD student at the University of Leuven in Belgium, and two professors tested female college students and found that women who had touched pants were more likely to consume than those who had touched T-shirts.
The closer you get from the stimulus, the more you crave it.
Why is haptic perception an effective incentive to consume?
Because it shortens the distance between you and the stimulus, the closer you get to the stimulus, the more you crave it.
We've all been impulsive shoppers a lot. Think about it. Are you (especially women) more likely to spend money after trying on clothes or eating something that looks delicious? This is the fundamental reason why businesses encourage you to try. California Institute of Technology has conducted a study in this area: when people buy snacks such as scribbles, their willingness to buy increases as the distance between them and the food shortens: those who see only the word "scribbles" buy the least; those who see pictures or see scribbles outside the window buy slightly more. And people in the store who bought close contact with them were the most. The researchers say this is a Pavlov reaction.
The study by Anuk Fansjee and two professors was more interesting. They were asked to do a "customer survey" for a clothing company: ask some female college students to rate the fabric of men's pants or T-shirts; then ask them to answer questions related to purchase decisions. The survey found that women who had touched flats, a "sexual cue," were more likely to consume more than those who had just touched a T-shirt or looked at them, and were willing to make bigger bets in dice-throwing games. Women who looked out the window at pants or touched T-shirts were more likely to spend money on personal hobbies, such as wine and chocolate.
In tactile marketing, one of the forerunner companies is the famous chocolate company Hershey. Hershey has long found that people enjoy peeling the tinfoil from the "Hershey Kiss" chocolate and wrapping it, which makes enjoying the "Hershey Kiss" a special experience. The British supermarket chain ASDA removed several toilet paper packages to make it easier for customers to touch and compare different kinds of paper. As a result, sales of its own brands in stores have risen sharply and the space for the product on its shelves has expanded by 50%.
Tactile sense can also be applied in other areas, such as a survey conducted by the University of Wisconsin and the University of Kent, which showed that people are more willing to donate money and spend time helping those people if they see a sample of blankets sent to them in a charity brochure held by volunteers. Tactile stimulation also extends to electronic touch screens, and many surveys have found that when people shop on touch screens, they feel more attractive than when they shop on computers, thereby increasing their buying behavior.
More emotionally attractive olfactory marketing
Of all human senses, the sense of smell is the most sensitive and most closely related to memory and emotion. Olfaction is an intuitive sensation, unlike vision and hearing, which requires the understanding and analysis of the brain. Scientists have shown that the nose can remember up to 10,000 odors, and that olfactory memory is twice as accurate as visual memory; people recall odors a year ago with 65 percent accuracy, while recalling pictures seen three months ago with only 50 percent accuracy.
One such example is the experiment conducted by Professor Alejana Coresner of the University of Michigan's Sensory Laboratory with Mae Lun of Nanyang Polytechnic University in Singapore and Maureen Murray of Rutgers University. The three of them found that soaking pencils with the scent of tea tree oil dramatically improved their memory of the brand and other details of the pencil and lasted longer: two weeks later, those with odorless pencils had 73 percent less information to recall, while those with tea tree oil-scented pencils had 73 percent less information to recall. Only 8% of them are forgotten.
Smell marketing has three advantages, including a permanent open sense of smell, unique, and more emotional appeal. We're exposed to a lot of confusing visual and auditory marketing information every day, while we're less vigilant about scent marketing and don't usually feel bombarded by smell. Olfaction is also more emotionally appealing because it connects directly to the right limbic system, the source of emotion and emotion in the human brain.
Starbucks, Disney Park and other companies are well-known masters of the use of smell marketing. A few years ago, Dunkin'Donuts, famous for its doughnuts in China, Japan and South Korea, conducted an experiment in South Korea to promote coffee, another of its main products: when downtown advertising songs were played on buses on certain routes, the preset atomizer on the bus was sound-aware. Don't technology, and release the aroma of coffee, so that passengers can take the lead. The campaign led to a 16% increase in customers and a 29% increase in sales at the store near the bus stop. Smell is also one of the best ways to reinforce positive emotions, such as when a European home improvement store found that the use of a special fragrance emitted the smell of new lawn mowing, customers greatly improved the evaluation of employees in the store.
Many star-rated hotels are also good at using smell marketing, they emit different odors in the lobby, enhance the experience of the guests, and produce smell recognition, in order to subtly create a memory, but anyone who smells this smell, will recall the pleasant experience of staying in the hotel. The famous example is the Vanden Hyatt Hotel in France. In 2002, when the hotel planned its logo odor, the perfumers decided to use the patchouli scent because it was so low that it was thought to match the reddish-brown hue and luxurious details of the hotel. In addition, the perfumers added citrus and natural cool wood. Extracts and other odors. Eventually, the smell was described as "fresh cement poured on raw oak, with a little fresh cinnamon cake, rich thick yellow-brown silk texture smell".
Sensory perception has a profound impact on people's attitudes, moods, memories, and so on. Although sensory marketing has existed for many years, many companies have realized that sensory perception can deeply affect the deep part of our brain. There is a huge potential to be tapped. With the rapid development of technology, communication between companies and consumers is developing into a multi-faceted dialogue. Marketers need to find opportunities to connect with people's senses in different consumption scenarios, so that products can make their own voices through multiple channels, and use the senses to create and enhance product characteristics, so that people can remember.
Wang Xiaohong's Compiling
Wang Xiaohong is the senior editor of Harvard Business Review Chinese version in Shanghai.
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