Marketing textbook, chapter 6

The documentary „Attack on the senses“ by Jan Tenhaven shows how strongly consumers are unconsciously influenced by multisensual, especially non-linguistic perceptions and what efforts many providers are already making today.

In the context of experience-orientated product design, which is concerned with the emotional differentiation of products and brands, the company has various design tools at its disposal. These means provide stimuli from various sensory modalities (sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch), which the consumer perceives with their senses and decodes with regard to their meaning. Scheier and Held refer to this as the sensory codes of a brand (see Aus der Wissenschaft 8-1). Through the simultaneous, targeted use of several stimulus modalities, it is possible to convey the same experience several times and thus more effectively. Several sensory-specific individual or partial experiences are then combined to create a multisensory overall experience. In the Tenhaven documentary, we learn how the renowned fragrance designer Sissel Toolas developed a specific hotel fragrance for the Swiss hotel group Swisshotels to help differentiate it from functionally similar hotels. Friedrich Blutner, a psycho-acoustician from Saxony, optimises the sound of a new hoover from Miele. Another article reports on the restaurant of the future, an industry-funded research project at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. A canteen has been transformed into an experimental research space to investigate the effects of smell, taste, colour and music on consumers„ eating habits. Per Niemer explains how colours in particular can influence us unconsciously and how the new colour trends for product design in the coming years will be identified and then coordinated worldwide by a colour cartel. The article on the Real Futurestore shows how the individual sensory stimuli are already being used systematically in retail. Here you can see interactively controlled fish “swimming" on the floor in front of the fish counter, smell the scent of herbs de Provence above the fish counter and hear the soft screeching of seagulls in the background.

Sources:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQvgu4Jah8c (as at 27 June 2022).