Buyology - Martin Lindstrom [60]
As I’ve mentioned, advertisers have long assumed that the logo is everything. Companies have spent thousands of hours and millions of dollars creating, tweaking, altering, and testing their logos—and making sure those logos are in our faces, above our heads, and tattooed beneath our feet. That’s because marketers have long focused on driving and motivating consumers visually. But the truth of the matter is, visual images are far more effective, and more memorable, when they are coupled with another sense—like sound or smell. To fully engage us emotionally, companies are discovering, they’d be better off not just inundating us with logos, but pumping fragrances into our nostrils and music into our ears as well.
It’s called Sensory Branding™.
FOR THE FIRST of two related experiments on brands and our senses, our volunteers would be testing two experimental fragrances on behalf of a well-known fast-food restaurant chain—let’s call it Pete’s—and choosing which fragrance best complemented a certain menu item.
Over the course of the next month, Dr. Calvert and her team exposed our twenty study subjects to images (including logos) and fragrances of four well-known brands. First the images and fragrances were presented individually, and then at the same time. These included Johnson & Johnson’s No More Tears Baby Shampoo, Dove soap, a frosty, ice-filled glass of Coca-Cola, as well as an assortment of images and aromas associated with Pete’s and their global chain of fast-food restaurants. By pressing a button on their hand consoles, our volunteers could control the onset of the images and fragrances, and rate the appeal of what they were viewing and smelling on a nine-point scale, ranging from very unpleasant to very pleasant.
After crunching the data, Dr. Calvert discovered that for the most part, when our volunteers were presented with the images and the fragrances individually, they found them equally pleasant to look at as to smell, suggesting that we as consumers are equally seduced by the sight of a product as by its scent. However, when Dr. Calvert presented the images and fragrances at the same time, she found that, in general, subjects rated the image-fragrance combinations to be more appealing than either the image or the fragrance alone. And, even more intriguingly, when Dr. Calvert presented our volunteers with the first of Pete’s two experimental fragrances along with an image of a product that seemed incongruous with the smell—say a picture of a Dove soap bar along with the fragrance of scorched canola oil—the “pleasantness” quotient dropped, because the image and the fragrance didn’t match up.
The other image-fragrance combination, on the other hand, went over like gangbusters. Just imagine viewing a fish-filet sandwich along with the slightest whiff of lemon, perhaps evoking that summer you spent grilling fresh fish on the beaches of Cape Cod or the Hamptons. Much more pleasant, right? That’s because this time around the sight and smell of the product were congruous—a perfect collaboration between the eyes and the nose.
So what is going on in our brains that makes us prefer certain image/smell combinations over others? As Dr. Calvert explained, when we see and smell something we like at the same time—like Johnson & Johnson’s Baby Powder combined with its signature vanilla-y scent—various regions of our brains light up in concert. Among them is the right medial orbitofrontal cortex, a region associated with our perception of something as pleasant or likable. But in cases where a brand matches up poorly with a fragrance—say, Johnson’s Baby Shampoo combined with an odor of root beer—there’s activation in the left lateral orbitofrontal cortex, a region of the brain connected to aversion and repulsion, which is why our subjects responded so unfavorably to the incongruous combinations. What’s more, when we are exposed to combinations that seem to go together, the right piriform cortex (which is our primary olfactory cortex) and the amygdala