Has it ever happened to you that you were walking down the street and you were stopped in your tracks because the person who walked right past you was wearing a fragrance that took you back to your high school years? If you are anything like me, then the answer is most likely ‘yes’.

The power of sensory impulses is not news for anyone. We are emotional creatures and we create strong associations using our senses: A song that reminds you of your first girlfriend, a smell that takes you back 10 years through time, or a photograph that brings back memories of that incredible trip you went on with your friends. What is new, however, and becoming more and more popular is the way companies use the power of sensory impulses to advertise their products and services. Let’s face it; we are bombarded with visual images, logos, bus ads and banners all day long, every day. And for all male readers, even when you are at the urinal in a restaurant or a pub, you are forced to look at ads on the wall. In this state of visual assault and overstimulation of our visual senses, it is becoming impossible for our brains to focus on any one of these ads and we are blocking out the majority of what we see. According to a recent study, the companies now have less than two seconds to grab our attention.

In this visual chaos (just take a look at the photos of Times Square in New York and her little sister Dundas Square in Toronto), the power of sensory associations is becoming more and more crucial for companies. So much so that numerous restaurant chains are adding artificial food scents to their ventilation systems to appeal to our senses and to forge the brand-smell association in our brains. Or how a campaign by Dunkin’ Donuts in South Korea municipal buses increased nearby store visits by 16% and sales at the same stores by 29% simply by releasing a coffee aroma into the bus whenever the company jingle played. In his book ‘buy-ology’, Martin Lindstrom became the reason for one of the biggest disappointments in my life when he said that the new car smell that we all so passionately love actually comes from an aerosol can. The examples can go on and on but the bottom line is that the more senses are stimulated, the more enhanced our experiences are. And these influences are very subtle, which makes them even more powerful because we don’t perceive them as marketing messages and therefore we don’t react with the usual resistance to traditional ads and other hard-sell techniques.

The best way to summarize the increasing importance of sense-based marketing would be to quote Aradhna Krishna, the author of Customer Sense: How the 5 Senses Influence Buying Behavior: “In the past, communications with customers were essentially monologues—companies just talked at consumers. Then they evolved into dialogues, with customers providing feedback. Now they’re becoming multidimensional conversations, with products finding their own voices and consumers responding viscerally and subconsciously to them.”

So far I tried to convince you of the great impact of sensory marketing and I hope that I was able to make a good enough case. So what is going to happen in the future? There is no doubt in my head that sense-based marketing will become bigger and bigger. There are already firms out there focusing solely on creating sensory brand experiences and I think that we are going to see more of these companies in the near future. In a competitive landscape where it is becoming virtually impossible to differentiate your product purely based on visual appearances, there is no question that companies will resort to newer methods to try and break through the clutter. My question then is not whether or not sensory marketing will get bigger, because I believe that it will. To me it is rather a question of whether or not we will reach a point of saturation as we have with visual marketing. I am curious to see if there will come a day that we are so stimulated on multiple senses by product advertisements that we will reach a state in which our brains are going to filter out most of it like they do today. We will see…