Sensory marketing covers the five sense with different degrees.
The five senses : The five powers (sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch) that your body uses to get information about the world around you.
A mix a different senses using at the same time is called polysensory marketing.
Visual marketing :
According to Maslow, humans have a natural need of esthetic. It is an existential need. Once the primary needs are satisfied, the quest of the beautiful is beginning. The sight is the most solicited sense because it is the most stimulated by the environment.
The choice of the forms and the colours during the phase of product creation, selling space and advertising campaign is a key factor of success.
Inside the shops, promotional videos and videos related to the products and environment of the firm is a concrete example in the recent evolution of visual marketing.
The videos can explain how the products work and their utilities.
Sound marketing :
It is defined as sound utilisation in order to arouse different feelings to the consumers such as affective feelings, cognitive and/or compartmental feelings in favour of the buying act.
The use of music in stores is not recent. The sound enforces the identity of a brand and aimed to be in harmony with the customers. A recent study ( Les réactions des acheteurs aux modalités de la musique d'ambiance : cas de la notoriété et du style - Revue française du marketing, septembre 2003 ) shows that classical music has more effects than variety music and a well known song has more impact on amount of money spent and unscheduled purchase than an unknown song.
Olfactive marketing :
It is a new step in sensory marketing. Human can distinguish 4 000 different perfumes according to an article published in Marketing Magazine.
It the sense that drives the most emotional value. A young child is capable of perceiving smells before perceiving sounds, colours and textures.
Several experiences have proved the decisive influence of smells on the customer’s behaviour. Some studies have proved that a good smell could have biased time perception of consumers and could have modified the visual or gustative perception.
In certain shops, consumers can smell flavours from food to guide the customers in the different part of the shops.
Gustative marketing :
It directly relates to the intrinsic attributes of the products : organoleptic properties for the foodstuffs. The taste is an effective tool for differentiation. The laboratories of the companies devote important means to better including/understanding the mechanism of the taste. The stake of this research is that of information as regards quality required to the consumer. A French meat brand like Charal has imposed its meats thanks to a founded marketing step on the fact to be tender and the taste. The company thus created for itself an image of quality such as criteria of traceability and standards.
Tactile marketing :
The touch creates familiarity with the store or the product. A company can use for example a soft red carpet which takes part in the well-being of consumers. A comfortable ground encourages more with the dawdling. In the restaurant, the weight of the handled forks and spoons, the thickness of touched glasses, the texture of the towels, the comfort of a chair… can take part largely in the pleasures of the meal. The car manufacturers make important research on the touch of the gear shift wheel and lever so that those get feelings of well being and solidity.
It can be trying for a distributor to use the techniques of sensory marketing with an aim of handling the consumer. Thus the presentation of the bread in an environment of traditional bakery inside a great surface whereas this one is manufactured in an industrial way, or the diffusion of a leather odour to promote settees in leather imitation amounts misleading the customer and consists in skewing the judgement of the consumer while making him believe that the product holds qualities which it does not have. This practice would fall under the blow from the law for misleading publicity.
