Affecting consumers with sensory marketing

Based on the article:

Khrisna, A. (2011). An integrative review of sensory marketing: Engaging the senses to affect perception,
judgment and behavior. Journal of consumer psychology, 22, 332 351.

Every day we see advertisement of thousands of products in the marketplace but at the end of the day we
can only remember a few of them. An efficient way to touch consumers could be sensory marketing that
creates unconscious triggers that appeal to the five basic senses. Khrisna (2011) defines sensory marketing
as marketing that engages the consumers senses and affects their perception, judgement and behavior.

Sensation is the biochemical event that happens when the stimulus hits the sensory organ. Perception
comes next- it is the awareness or understanding of the sensory information. Caf wall illusion is one of the
visual illusions where the difference between sensation and perception can be easily understood. First
biochemical sensation is that the horizontal lines are parallel but after interpretation of the sensation that
there are heavy blocks on the planks, they dont seem to be parallel anymore (Khrisna, 2011).

Several consumer behavior studies have concentrated on vision but in the paper Khrisna (2011) stretches
the importance of other senses. Touch is the first sense to develop and many studies have showed the
importance of touch for humans. However the need for touch is not same for every individual. Peck &
Childers (2003) for example studied internet shopping, and find out that people with high need-for-touch
(NFT) get frustrated and dont feel confident if they cannot feel the product before purchase (as cited in
Khrisna, 2011). Touch can also have negative effects. Interestingly, products touching products can lead to
feelings of disgust if source object (diapers, cat litter) touches target object (potato chips). According to law
of contagion, the contamination continues even though the source doesnt touch the target anymore
(Rozin & Nemeroff 1994, as cited in Khrisna, 2011).

Humans are able to distinguish up to 10 000 different scent combinations (Buck & Axel, 1991, as cited in
Khrisna, 2011). Herz (2004) said that scent is something that can be remembered after a long period of
time, and the memories triggered by scent are more emotional than by other senses (as cited in Khrisna
2011). Scent even enhances recall of verbal information (Lwin, Morrin & Khrisna, 2010; as cited in Khrisna,
2011).

Majority of marketing communication is based on audition; People hear advertisements in TV and radio but
also ambient sounds in hotels and restaurants. This background music can positively effect customer mood,
time spent in a location, perception of time spent and even actual spending. Dahl (as cited in Khrisna, 2011)
stressed that voice pitch and vocal speech rate are also two major influencers of verbal communication and
how it is encountered.

There are only five pure tastes (sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami) that humans can distinguish but when
we talk about taste it is actually a combination of all five senses. Herz (2007) for example argued that it is
hard to recognize the difference between an apple and a potato if you cannot see or smell the food (as
cited in Khrisna, 2011). In this regard, an advertisement affecting taste should not concentrate on taste only
but include multiple senses that then leads to better taste perceptions (Elder & Khrisna 2010, as cited in
Khrisna, 2011). Actual and perceived consumption as well as satiation are also related to the taste.
The paper from Khrisna (2011) is structured around the conceptual framework of sensory marketing. As we
can see from the examples above, sensations lead to perception and there is a clear connection between
perception and attitude, behavior and memory. However, there has been debate about the theories of
cognition. Standard theories believe that cognition happen independent of perception but grounded theory
researchers suggest that our whole body is included in cognition; our bodily states, situated actions and
mental simulations generate the cognitive activity. There is still lots of space for further research between
these links as well as in other fields of sensory marketing (Khrisna, 2011).

REFERENCES:

Buck, L., & Axel, R. (1991). A novel multigene family may encode odorant receptors: A molecular basis for
odor recognition. Cell, 65 (1), 175 187.

Dahl, D. W. (2010). Understanding the role of spokesperson voice in broadcast advertising. In A. Krishna
(Ed.), Sensory marketing: Research on the sensuality of products (pp. 169 182). New York: Routledge.

Elder, R., & Krishna, A. (2010). The effect of advertising copy on sensory thoughts and perceived taste. The
Journal of Consumer Research, 36 (5), 748 756.

Herz, R. S. (2004). A naturalistic analysis of autobiographical memories triggered by olfactory visual and
auditory stimuli. Chemical Senses, 29 (3), 217 224.

Herz, R. (2007). The scent of desire: Discovering our enigmatic sense of smell. New York: William Morrow.

Khrisna, A. (2011). An integrative review of sensory marketing: Engaging the senses to affect perception,
judgment and behavior. Journal of consumer psychology 22, 332 351.

Peck, J., & Childers, T. L. (2003). To have and to hold: The influence of haptic information on product
judgments. Journal of Marketing 67, 35 48.

Rozin, P., & Nemeroff, C. (1990). The laws of sympathetic magic in disgust and other domains. Cultural
Psychology (pp. 205 232). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.