Make Your Brand Irresistible By Marketing To The Senses

Today, there are dozens of theories on how best to attract customers.

“Tell a story,” some say. “Use images,” others say.

But what if the answer were much simpler? What if the answer is simply to appeal to a few things that are as basic and essential as possible: the five senses?

It turns out that good marketing is that simple. It’s known as “sensory marketing” and it’s taking the digital world by storm.

What Is Sensory Marketing?

Before we talk about sensory marketing, we need to define sensory branding, which is a type of marketing that appeals to all the senses.

Sensory marketing is the techniques you use to reach your customers’ senses and influence their behavior based on how your brand and tactics make them feel.

As we know, the five senses are sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell. Sensory marketing is simply the process of gaining a customer’s trust and attention by appealing to each of these five senses.

Why Does Sensory Marketing Work?

Today, great marketing is all about the customer experience. This is as true for something like website design as it is something like product creation. If the user doesn’t have a great time, none of it matters.

As you can imagine, sensory marketing ties in to this concept quite nicely.

Because it’s all about enhancing the customer experience, sensory marketing has become a go-to tactic for many multi-national brands.

How to Appeal to Your Audiences’ Senses

Get Emotional with Them

Emotions are impacting marketing today more than ever. If you want your customers to believe in your brand, you need to start by making an emotional appeal. Brands like Airbnb do it wonderfully with their “Belong Anywhere” campaign.

Think of it this way: The deeper you can connect emotionally with your readers, the more likely they are to remember your brand. This, in turn, will give you the opportunity to appeal to your other senses as well.

 Play on the Sense of Smell

When Dunkin Donuts used sensory marketing in South Korea, it threw a smell of coffee into the air while playing a company jingle. While this sounds a little too extreme for your brand, there are still ways to play with your customers’ sense of smell. Two clever options include placing scented ads in major magazines or using a branded fragrance in your stores.

Smell is a powerful sense and tests have shown that pleasant smells can improve mood by 40%. Find a way to incorporate the scent into your brand and keep it.

Don’t Forget About Sound

Sound takes many forms in advertising. It could be the State Farm jingle “Like a good neighbor …” or a slogan you can’t get out of your head. Sensory advertising today requires all brands to find a way to use sound in their branding efforts. If it sounds difficult, you can trust that there is always a way to do it.

 Play Up Touch

Touch is a powerful sense and it’s easy for most brands to tap into. There is practically always a way for your brand to take advantage of texture. This could mean using heavy, high-quality card stock for mailing ads or doing what you can to ensure your products feel good in the customer’s hands.

No matter how you incorporate it, make sure you don’t overlook this essential sensory opportunity in your market.

 Make It Beautiful

Sight is, of course, one of the most powerful senses in the world of advertising. Fortunately, it’s also easy to make the most of it. To leverage the value of visualization, make sure your business website is beautiful and attractive to customers, or hire a professional to design your social media or advertising graphics.

Color is an important component of vision, and brands like Coca-Cola and Virgin Airlines have found ways to use color to promote brand recognition for their products.

Sensory Marketing to Help Build Your Brand

Today, leveraging sensory marketing is one of the smartest ways for brands to spark emotions and stay engaged.

In addition, it is available for brands in all sectors and specialties. So regardless of whether you sell clothing or tech products, this is a tactic you can use to grow your brand.

Designed to put the importance of the customer experience first, sensory marketing is a powerful method for any business that wants to make its interactions with customers more meaningful and engaging. Plus, it’s accessible and easy to use, and if you do it right, it has the potential to overhaul your marketing strategy.

To learn more about sensory marketing or to start using it for your brand, contact the experts at Urban Arts today