Brand experience is a cornerstone of business, especially for those with a physical presence. Without a strong and consistent brand experience, it would be difficult to attract customers. So what are the individual core elements of the brand experience?
→ My #1 Lifetime Income Dividend Stocks. (From Oxford Club)
Let’s step back for a moment to consider what “experience” really means. Humans “experience” life through our five senses. right duh But here’s the problem: many brands fail to capitalize on all five.
As someone who curates the physical experience of your brand, you can most powerfully impact customers by appealing to all five senses in your brand strategy. This multi-sensory approach to brand marketing and brand execution is known as ‘sensory branding’.
We take a tour of the five senses from a brand perspective and look at some ways brands can extend their use of sensory branding into their physical locations which are, in effect, their theaters of brand experience.
Related: In the Age of Sensory Overload, How Can Brands Define Their Identity?
view
Of all the senses, sight is what gets the most press, but usually the focus shines on image and iconography. The golden arches of McDonald’s. The green silhouette of the Starbucks mermaid. Colonel Sanders’ friendly face on a bucket of KFC fried chicken. These icons are so linked to these brands that they have permeated our collective imagination.
Instead, let’s pop the hood and look at the color psychology that makes this engine turn. Just as soft lighting or harsh lighting can dramatically alter the mood of a room, colors set the pace for a brand environment.
The ubiquitous presence of yellow in the McDonald’s brand evokes notions of sunshine, warmth and joy, bringing to mind childhood and smiling faces. The green of Starbucks and Whole Foods suggests robust health and oneness with nature.
Tip: Use color theory to your advantage. Understand what feelings your brand is trying to evoke, then deploy colors in your environments as secret agents, tasked with surreptitiously monitoring the moods and emotions of your guests.
smell
The sense of smell, the “emotional sense”, travels a unique path to the human brain that connects it deeply with memory. Brands that have successfully married scents pleasing to their customers’ memories have an extra layer of seductive ability.
Think Abercrombie & Fitch. The garments that fill their stores are infused with their signature fragrances, creating powerful associations between these fierce, outdoor scents and the brand, as well as the lifestyle that the brand suggests.
Escaping from the Abercrombie store in the mall, you might be drawn to another powerful scent emanating from Cinnabon. The aroma of cinnamon is only associated with warmth, comfort and perhaps guilty pleasure.
Fitness brands, to be sure, don’t have that kind of natural olfactory advantage, but there are preventative measures you can take to compensate. For example, a scent diffuser can be used to pump the energizing scent of eucalyptus into a gym or the relaxing aroma of lavender into a spa.
Recommendation: Face it: To some degree, your brand probably already smells. Assess whether this can be amplified to your benefit or whether other scents should be deployed as defensive agents.
Related: How Retailers Like Apple Mess With Our Senses To Boost Sales
sound
Sound is often thought of in terms of music. Along these lines, brands like Starbucks use playlists as audio wallpapers in their locations, suggesting certain moods and lifestyles that are associated with their brands.
But sound affects the brand experience in many other ways. As audio engineers and good architects know, reverberation levels in indoor spaces can significantly affect the quality of experience in that space.
Speech intelligibility is significantly affected in highly reverberant spaces. If you can’t understand what your dining companions are saying, chances are you won’t take them to the same restaurant. On the other hand, if there is too little reverberation in a dining space, there can be an eerie feeling of closeness to the surrounding tables. It’s about finding the right balance. Depending on the type of environment you want to create, elements can be added to absorb or reflect sound.
You can also flip the script on bad sounds. For example, Planet Fitness features “Lunch Alarms” on their walls. The net effect here is that by incorporating an occasional alarm sound into your brand experience, you discourage some other sounds you explicitly don’t want in your brand experience, namely the beastly growls and heavy weight drops of the “lunks”, common. to other gyms.
Recommendation: Go to one of your competitor’s locations and sit quietly for a moment with your eyes closed; Take note of what you hear, and also what you don’t hear, and then apply those thoughts to your brand. Is the clattering of metaphorical pots and pans something you want to hide or emphasize for energy? Choice of distributor.
Touch
Often overlooked, the sense of touch can have a powerful impact on the brand experience, from comfort sensations of furniture temperature and texture to using hands-on experience with products or even and all with other humans.
Consider how Apple deliberately has a very hands-on experience in its retail locations, designed so that you have the tactile experience of feeling the newest iProduct in your hands, manifesting its attachment to those same hands, until the next model comes out , of couse. .
Recommendation: Think about what textures people will encounter when they interact with your brand and the length of time they will interact with them. Be consistent with your temperatures, your furniture and your high fives.
Related: 5 Unique Ways to Build Your Brand Like Big Businesses Do
Taste
It is true that taste is the sense most often limited to a single vertical: food service. However, outliers exist. Think Ikea, famous for furniture, but also for the Swedish meatballs you’re probably embarrassed to admit you love. In fact, they’re part of the Ikea brand experience, bringing a touch of salty Swedish friendliness to the mix.
But back to food service, strategic gifts can go a long way in the taste department. If you go to your local Friendly’s or DQ, chances are you’ll be offered free samples of different flavors of ice cream, triggering your sweet tooth and, soon after, your wallet.
Also think about the signature, warm, soft, unlimited breadsticks you get after ordering your meal at Olive Garden. After stuffing your face with this, chances are you’ll take half your ticket home, but also make it back to the OG.
Recommendation: Consider ways to interweave the sense of taste with your brand experience; but if you offer to put something in your customer’s mouth, make sure it tastes good. In other words, if you’re an oil change franchise that serves coffee in the waiting room, make sure the coffee doesn’t taste like your motor oil.
Final Thought: “The 6th Sense”
Finally, some general advice regarding your sensory branding efforts: Be knowledgeable, be intentional, and be consistent!
Some brands that master the fabric of the five senses in the mosaic of their brand experience can capture that elusive “sixth sense”: the clairvoyance of being in the presence of the master touch.
Before you consider the experience, you’ll want to hear this.
MarketBeat tracks Wall Street’s top-rated and top-performing research analysts and the stocks they recommend to their clients daily. MarketBeat has identified the five stocks that top analysts are quietly whispering to their clients to buy now before the broader market takes notice … and Experience wasn’t on the list.
Although Experience currently has a “hold” rating among analysts, top rated analysts believe these five stocks are best buys.
Check out the five stocks here
20 stocks to sell now
MarketBeat just published its list of 20 stocks that Wall Street analysts hate. These companies may appear to have good fundamentals, but major analysts smell something seriously rotten. There are some of these companies lurking around your wallet? Find out by entering your email address below.
Get this free report
