Taste is very natural to a brand associated with edible products or drinks. But what about brands like Mastercard that do not have any natural reason to be associated with taste? Well, we could come out with edible prepaid cards, but that’s probably not a smart idea. Instead, Mastercard launched a program called Priceless Tables, where a fabulous dinner is served at a table or two set up in exotic and completely unexpected places—like on top of a billboard in Manhattan or next to a dinosaur skeleton in a Chicago museum or on a baseball diamond. These tables, thousands of which we created around the world, create a terrific experience for the consumers, at scale. And they directly result in a brand image uplift, with a lot of conversations about it in social media.

We even launched restaurants, including in Manhattan. Some of these restaurants, by design, are faithful re-creations of exotic restaurants from around the world. And we keep changing the themes to keep the concepts fresh. For example, one of the restaurants, called The Rock, was a very exotic restaurant that stands literally on a rock, off the coast of Zanzibar in Tanzania. We replicated the restaurant to a T, including the view from each window to be exactly the same as if the diner were in the original restaurant. The menu, the sea breeze, the fragrance, the specially composed background music leveraging our sonic melody—it created a stunning multisensory experience. The idea was to create such wholesome, multisensory experiences that money cannot buy—only a Mastercard can bring them to you.

Mastercard has even created macarons in unique flavors in partnership with Ladurée, the premier French baker. One flavor is the taste of optimism, the second, the taste of passion, and they are presented in the two colors of the Mastercard logo, red and yellow. Sold through select Ladurée stores, they are also given to Mastercard clients at various events and conferences to reinforce the brand through their taste buds.

How Aston Martin Employs Multisensory Branding 

Another excellent example of multisensory branding comes from Aston Martin, the iconic British carmaker, famously associated with James Bond. This brand has done some amazing work in the multisensory space. As a luxury brand, its sales volumes are naturally limited and similarly don’t have gigantic marketing budgets. So, rather than relying on traditional marketing, they explored new fields to make their brand impact felt. One such direction is sensorial marketing, including sonic branding.

Unsurprisingly for a brand that has been around for more than a hundred years, the sonic identity has been built over many decades and at its heart is the distinctive sound of the engine. The exhaust note is the rumble of the car, a carefully engineered soundtrack that can switch from mellow to malevolent with a squeeze of the throttle. Nothing has been left to chance to ensure that every sound the car makes is in harmony with the engine sound, from the seat belt alerts and low fuel reminders, to the particular click of the gearshift and the soft creak of the leather upholstery.

Each element of the sonic identity, no matter how insignificant, has been given much thought. Using the fasten seat belt tone as an example, Aston Martin decided to make the warning more melodic, to be suggestive rather than demanding. If the driver ignores it, there is a second and a third transition in intensity to convey the urgency. The fundamentals of sonic identity are matching the sounds the car makes to the visual identity of the brand. Sounds that express and encapsulate the craftsmanship, refinement, and unique character of the brand.

Aston Martin also has deployed the other senses of touch and smell. It takes more than a hundred hours to craft the interior of an Aston Martin and it is all done to deliver a sensory experience, from the unique touch sensation when a customer runs her fingers over the leather interior to the aroma of the leather. The aroma is so distinctive that when Aston Martin Works restores a vintage Aston Martin, they will source the leather from the original supplier to ensure the aroma of the leather is authentic to that car. Talk of being obsessed, in a great way, to being true to and consistent with every aspect of the brand manifestation.

Gerhard Fourie, Director of Marketing and Brand Strategy of Aston Martin, says “The identity of the brand has developed over many decades, and even when we move into new fields of marketing, it is essential that we maintain the essence of the brand. And to do so, we go to extraordinary lengths.”

The Emergence Of Multisensory Branding 

A number of other companies have been on the multisensory branding journey, albeit just getting started. Hotel chains, in particular Marriott, have been using “signature scents” as part of their branding campaign for many years. Many retailers also take a similar approach, using scent to engage the brain’s limbic system— the part most connected to memory and behavior.

Nike has found that when they added scents to its stores, purchase intent among customers increased by up to 80 percent. In a similar report, a gas station minimart in the UK found that the smell of coffee in the air increased their sales by 300 percent. However, this should not be confused with sonic branding. Merely adding fragrances to enhance the consumer experience or stimulate their brain or evoke their feelings is not sensory branding. It is just sensory stimulation. Sensory branding is where the sounds, smells, taste, touch, etc., are all unique to that brand and are recognizable and uniquely associated with that brand. It is a brand identity creation, across multiple senses.

Multisensory branding is all about reaching consumers through all their senses in ways that are relevant, authentic, compelling, and non-intrusive, thus cutting through the massive clutter and reaching the consumers’ hearts and minds.

We’re in marketing 5.0, it’s the era of sense and sensibility. The manifestation of all the technology available to marketers means that a lot of dehumanisation is going to happen, there’s going to be a dislocation and displacement of human interaction even more than what we’ve witnessed in the last five years.

The next phase for marketers is bringing the human back into human interactions and understanding the sensibilities of human beings – not just interests and desires, but the finer subtle elements of individuals. Moving your brand and its boundaries is the only way to connect with consumers in a compelling and impactful way.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Mastercard CMO Raja Rajamannar, excerpted from his book QUANTUM MARKETING: Mastering the New Marketing Mindset for Tomorrow’s Consumers  Copyright © 2021 by Raja Rajammanar. Used by permission of HarperCollins Leadership.

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Rob Valsler posted a photo of some chapattis on his blog in the Millward Brown Greenhouse (the company’s own social network). Chapattis, thin flat rounds of unleavened bread, are ubiquitous in Indian and South Asian cooking, but unlike most of their kind, these chapattis had writing on them. Apparently the Hindi script on the chapattis asks, “Did you wash your hands with Lifebuoy?”

The chapattis were distributed to thousands of pilgrims from a stall set up by Lifebuoy at Kumbh Mela, the world’s largest religious gathering. In his post, Rob asks if the tangible dimension of handling the chapattis adds to the “experience” of the communication. Does the physical act of touching food increase receptivity to the message about hand washing? (He suggests the connection does little for enjoyment of the chapattis).

As Graham Page notes in response to Rob’s post, there is evidence to suggest that tangible communications have an advantage over the intangible. In 2007, working in collaboration with the Centre for Experimental Consumer Psychology at Bangor University, Millward Brown used functional Magnetic Resonance Imagery (fMRI) scanning to understand how the brain reacts to physical and virtual stimuli.

You can read more about the research here, but the findings suggest that tangible advertising not only engages more senses, it appears to produce deeper engagement with the advertising. The printed materials evoked more brain activity associated with integration of sight and touch, stronger emotional response (suggestive of stronger memory formation) and deeper integration with personal thoughts and feelings.

I would note that in the last finding, touch seems to improve integration with personal thoughts and feelings, seems similar to the finding that touch improves the desire to own a brand. It makes me think we need to reinstate the physical experience of a brand as an important component of the marketing mix. While digital and augmented reality are new and sexy, maybe we need to remind ourselves that humans are still designed to experience the world through all of our senses, not just one.

So what do you think? What other forms of non-traditional tangible ad formats have you come across? Please share your thoughts.

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Check out YouTube and you’ll notice that among the most-watched videos on the site, is one of a baby giggling. More than 107 million people have downloaded it.

There can be no doubt – sound is immensely powerful. And yet 83 per cent of all the advertising we’re exposed to on a daily basis (bearing in mind that the average person will see two million TV commercials in a single lifetime) focuses, almost exclusively, on the sense of sight. That leaves just 17 per cent for the remaining four senses. Consider to what extent we rely on sound. It confirms almost all our digital and electronic connections. We rely on it to dial or text on our cell phones. Interestingly, the revenue from the slot machines in Las Vegas fell by 24 per cent when the whirring and tinkling sounds was removed. Furthermore, experiments conducted in restaurants show that when music slower than the rhythm of a heartbeat is played, we eat slower and we eat more!

Can sound make us buy more, want more, dream more and eat more? Any 50-year-old American can sing a whole range of television jingles from the 1970s – they are all well stored in the recesses of our brain. Yet if you were to ask the same of the generation who have recently come of age, you will find them stumped. Have the magical tunes disappeared, or has the advertising world lost sight of the fact that people do indeed have speakers at home?

I decided to put these questions to the test.

By teaming up with neuroscience marketing company BUYOLOGY INC and Elias Arts a sound identity company, we wired up 50 volunteers and subjected them to neuroscience-based galvanic, pupil and brainwave methods. We learnt that sound has remarkable power. This may not be surprising for many, but it was certainly surprising to realize just how many commercial brands have made their way into the world’s ten most powerful sounds over the past 20 years. The sound of brands came in ahead of some of the most familiar and comforting sounds of nature. But it was in the second and third places where the most astonishing surprises occurred.

Forget the sound of waves or the song of birds – they didn’t even make the top 10 – but a computer chip, which most of us have never even seen, took the prominent second spot. Who could have imagined just how strongly we would respond to the sound of Intel? This result indicates that repetition is the key, since most of us can’t even sing it. What this tells us is that there’s no limit to this phenomenon, because after all, a computer chip doesn’t really have a sound.

The third most powerful sound is a young one – not much older than 10 years – and yet it had such a profound effect on our research subjects that the moment they heard it, they removed their headsets, and reached for wherever they keep their cell phones to answer its ‘vibrating’ call. Regardless of whether the phone is switched to ‘silent’, the vibration has a sound of its own. It’s hardly surprising that the Blackberry has been dubbed a CrackBerry – even President Obama is hooked.

Psychologically speaking, this is not a happy discovery. Recent studies show that the first thing we do when we wake is check our BlackBerry. Going to the bathroom, brushing our teeth and eating breakfast takes a back seat. Increasingly people sleep beside their phones – that message that arrives at 4.00am is now a priority!

Even though the sound of a vibrating phone has taken second place to a baby’s giggles, it seems that in just over a decade technology provides the predominant sounds for daily life. Perhaps it’s just a matter of time before brains registering the sounds of sizzling steaks, newly lit cigarettes and sparkling sodas, will become sounds that are immediately brand-related and we will think Outback, Marlboro and Dr Pepper.

THE MOST ADDICTIVE SOUNDS IN THE WORLD
Non-branded and branded sounds
1. Baby giggle
2. Intel (Singers Pictured Above)
3. Vibrating phone
4. ATM / cash register
5. National Geographic
6. MTV
7. T-Mobile
8. McDonald’s
9. ‘Star Spangled Banner’
10. State Farm

Branded sounds
1. Intel
2. National Geographic
3. MTV
4. T-Mobile
5. McDonald’s
7. State Farm
8. AT&T
9. Home Depot
10 Palm Treo
11. PC Richard

Top 10 non-branded sounds
1. Baby giggle
2. Vibrating phone
3. ATM / cash register
4. ‘Star Spangled Banner’
5. Sizzling steak
6. Hail to the Chief
7. Cigarette light and inhale
8. ‘Wedding March’
9. ‘Wish Upon a Star’
10. Letterman theme

The sound study was conducted in partnership with BUYOLOGY INC and Elias Arts and the LINDSTROM company.

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Several surveys document our olfactory sense as probably the most impressionable and responsive of the five senses. Smells invoke memories and appeal directly to feelings without first being filtered and analyzed by the brain, which is how the remaining four senses are processed. We all recognize and are emotionally stimulated by, say, the scent of freshly cut grass, brackish sea air, or the perfume of roses. I’m convinced any car lover drinks in the smell of a new car.

Some are getting the hang of sensory appeal. Some supermarkets in Northern Europe are connected to bakeries by hundreds of meters of pipeline. The pipes carry the aroma of fresh bread to the stores’ entrances. The strategy works. Passers-by are struck with hunger and drawn inside the shop. A major British bank introduced freshly brewed coffee to its branches with the intention of making customers feel at home. The familiar smell relaxes the bank’s customers, not an emotion you’d normally associate with such an establishment.

Let’s not forget hearing and touch. Sound evokes memory and emotion. A familiar birdsong floods you with impressions of home; a hit song from your youth brings back the excitement and anxiety of your teens. AOL stepped up to the plate by using a voice familiar to many young Web users. Brittney fans discovered they can hear their idol not only when experiencing CDs and videos but also when launching AOL. Brittney lets you know, “You’ve got mail.” Kellogg’s has also invested in the power of auditory stimulus, testing the crunching of cereals in a Danish sound lab to upgrade their product’s “sound quality.”

Touch? One major reason online clothes shopping never took off is — you guessed it — people couldn’t touch the product. Amazon avoided this problem because people don’t attach so much importance to the feel of a book as they do to its content. Clothes, on the other hand, must be felt and tried on for size, color, texture, and so on. Physical proximity to product is elemental to purchase decisions. Shopping behavior depends on it.

If you agree so far, then tell me why it’s so difficult to find brands that promote themselves by appealing to all five senses. The only example of integrated sensory marketing I’m aware of comes from Singapore Airlines. The airline has demonstrated an understanding of the psychological importance of the senses in establishing and maintaining customer impressions. By appealing to all senses (music, fragrance, manner, and demeanor mingle in the cabin to evoke the airline’s image), the airline has created a branded flying experience.

So how can you appeal to all five senses on the Internet? Well, you can’t get them all. But you can optimize the tools available to you, one of the most neglected being sound. Why do you reckon you hear that familiar sound of fizzing Coke being poured into an ice-filled glass when you visit the Coca-Cola site and the sound of brewing coffee on the Starbucks site? Meaningful sound is a cheap but very effective way of appealing to another of your visitor’s senses and of powerfully enhancing your brand’s message.

Sensory perceptions are unique to each of us, as memories are. We experience powerful stimulations from them. How come marketers aren’t appealing to our senses more? The opportunity of brand building by leveraging the five senses is wide open. Brands are hovering in the wings, as an audience of our highly receptive senses sits in a darkened theater, anticipating a marketing show that hasn’t yet begun. Few companies have integrated their brand-building strategies to appeal to all the senses. This is probably the case for two reasons: not all media channels are able to connect with each of the five senses, and we really don’t know how to handle the phenomenon of total sensory appeal.

Rome wasn’t built in a day. I’m sure we’ll get there. The question is how long you can afford to wait? The rewards can be enormous.

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Some time ago, I was flicking through a copy of ‘People’ magazine, when I beheld something on its pages that caused me to just about fall off my chair. An ad promoting a TV series about Elvis, which was to run on CBS, was the source of my surprise.

“The King is Hear…”, proclaimed, typographically, what turned out to be the first part of this innovative notice. On turning to the next page of the magazine, sure enough, I did hear the King. Elvis was singing from the pages and a voiceover was promoting the series. If you managed to see this copy of the magazine, I’m quite sure you’d have found the advertisement as unforgettable as I did.

Naturally, I got on the phone straight away and tracked down the genius behind the ad. Tim Clegg, the inventor of the concept and CEO of Americhip in California, told me that the ad had secured 100% awareness among ‘People’ magazine’s readership – for the first time in the publication’s history. The innovative combination of sound and vision was an arresting achievement, in spite of the fact that we live in a world where hearing and sight are overtaxed senses. Yet, used in this highly differentiated way, sound and vision communicated powerfully.

This appeal to a combination of senses seems to do the trick when aiming to secure consumer attention. So it’s ironic that sound is not more strongly deployed as a sensory communication channel media online.

The first explanation that you might to me for this apparent oversight is that people don’t want noise around, especially at the office when you’re sneaking into your favorite website. But telltale noise to the guilty is suggestive sound to everyone else. Pick up your Apple iPod, use the famous navigation wheel, and you’ll notice that highly characteristic ‘tick-tick-tick’ sound – a sound which, over time, you associate exclusively with your iPod. When the battery in your cellphone is getting low, the phone emits an alert that’s instantly recognizable and, hopefully, prompts you to recharge the handset. And, when you’re beavering away in Microsoft Windows, the error sound checks your progress, causes you to review your last action, and rectify it. Such sounds become so familiar to us that we never really think about them. But we soon notice their absence, the unexpected gap they leave suggesting that the application or implement to which they belong mustn’t be working properly.

Navigation sound – let’s call it branded navigation sound, seeing that it comes to signify the brand – can be trademarked. But this potentially powerful brand signature is rarely used online. Why shouldn’t there be a half-second tune the instant that the payment for my purchase has been approved? Why, when I win an eBay auction, am I not honored with a momentary fanfare? Why isn’t sound used more as a brand builder?

You might be surprised at how few people find brand sounds unwelcome. A survey I conducted for my latest book, BRAND sense, shows that only 5% of people turn off the sound on a website if the sound is for navigation purposes, and only 7% don’t find website sound useful. Of course, the consumer should have the option to accept or reject sound along with any other communication approach made online. But the fact remains that sound is a branding tool that seems still to be a secret, so little is it used to create that crucial point of difference on brand’s websites.

And this takes me back to Americhip’s Elvis achievement. I was told that the cost for this attention-winning point of difference was minimal. I know I’ll never forget it and I’m sure everyone who encountered the ad would be equally impressed by it. The online environment is crowded, and print media is bursting at the seams with brands fighting for consumer attention. Combining communication techniques that appeal to aural as well as visual awareness makes an enormous impact on the viewer and reader. So take a leaf out of those pages advertising Elvis and use the power of sound to build your brand innovatively.

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