The atmospheric factor is not only important in the retailing business, but also significant to rising sensory marketing trends.
Retail stores focus on creating an exclusive atmosphere for their stores to increase the customer’s experience and communicate their brand image through physical characteristics and surrounding influences. Similarly, sensory marketing is also taking the atmospheric factor when selling a product. Three-dimensional, scented and audible add-ons are used to create an ideal surrounding environment for the customer when he or she is consuming the product. MarketingWeek suggests that successful sensory marketing can add $100M to brand value hence increasing sales! The article further provided analytics of successful sensory marketing and proved how it has been adding brand value to several large companies (Dove, Heinz, Print Power).
Sensory marketing takes advantage of the psychological factors that affect consumer behavior. From a psychological point of view, this type of sensory advertisements can affect how the brain perceives and learn about a product, which will lead to a stronger emotional tie with the consumer. These advertisements will then stay on the consumers mind for longer than basic text/imagery advertisements and hopefully develop a positive attitude towards the certain product. Therefore, products like food and cosmetics are benefiting a lot from sensory marketing.
“…when you’re looking to do as good a job as you can to bring your consumer an experience, you can create a world that is more sensorial than you might expect…” – Professor Spence
With one sense that can influence another, I believe even service providing companies can take advantage of sensory marketing to attract more clients and gain their trust more easily while boosting their brand image, value and service benefits. For example, travel agencies can divide their customer service stores into different sections according to the destination countries. Section A can be for tropical countries while Section B for cold countries during the corresponding seasons. Section A can be decorated in warm colors, tropical imagery on computer screens shown to customers, inscents, soothing background music. Meanwhile, Section B can be decorated in cool colors and winter imagery on computer screens. This contrast will create a sensorial experience for customers and may boost their interest in signing up for travelling packages as they will look forward for the real vacation, the real sensorial experiences.
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