Your brand and the 5 senses...

Logos are the main focus when it comes to branding for most businesses or business owners, they often forget about the other important aspects of a brand: the colour palette, the straplines, the imagery style, the personality, the values, the why. These are all basics that businesses owners or businesses overlook and sometimes simply don't value or even understand, your brand is like the DNA of your business, it dictates how you speak to the marketplace and plays a key role in your marketing strategy. What most people don't realise is that your brand can be and should be engaged with through the 5 senses, common ways to do this are visually and through sound:

• "IM LOVIN' IT" - MacDonalds
• "GRREEEEN GIIIAAANNTTT" - Green Giant
• "TA'DUM" - Netflix

In the current climate engaging senses, like touch and smell can be very difficult, digital has taken precedence of late, stimulating senses like sight and sound, we have entered the era of attention marketing, battling to gain the attention of our customers in order to market to them. It seems simple to dumb down the complex terminology of ‘brand’ into the standard Logo design or tagline creation. To those who don't understand brand this is all they may know and can be forgiven for assuming this is all there is to brand. Brands should in-fact be presented as a full sensory engagement, engaging: sight, sound, touch, taste and smell in many different creative ways, that have been designed to evoke emotions and generate meaningful connections with the chosen audience and target customer.

Here's my take on the 5 senses and how that can be linked to your brand, is this something you have ever thought about?

Sight: This is a crowded marketplace in the 21st century businesses are battling to grab the attention of the flick and scroll audience, with customers scrolling and flicking all day long and their brains being subjected to millions of images and video content everyday, its essential that strategically thought out, visual design is created to pull your potential customers in, how many times have you stopped and viewed a piece of content because you liked how it looked??? Using visual design in the form of static imagery, animation or video content to tell the story of your brand, products or service in a variety of ways will help you stand out from the marketplace, embrace the change and invest in good design.

Sound: From Snoop Dog in the JustEat adverts to the chime of a MacBook, sound can be used to help people identify your business or a specific product/service. Diving into the way the mind works sounds help to bring up past experiences and memories, by helping you make the connection between something tasing good and a businesses theme tune, they can evoke the urge to buy that product in you, using sound on its own has very little effect and often needs to be carried up with the other senses to help it become an effective branding tool.

Touch: Starling Bank have a great methodology when it comes to tactile brand recognition, when you sign up to starling bank you are engaged with visually through email marketing, they also engage their customers through traditional methods, you receive your new starting bank card in the post, when this happens you get a high quality envelope that screams we care about you! The envelope is not the usual white colour which helps it stand out and engages sight as a brand tool as well as touch, this simple, traditional method resonates with the end user and makes them feel valued. This is a very well thought out and considered customer experience journey that ensures the customer is engaged using the different touches to create brand recognition in the minds of their new customers. From high quality materials to textured merchandise you can engage your customers with a combination of touch and sight which usually works best.

Smell: Have you ever walked into a supermarket and instantly caught the smell of bread baking and it draws you into the back of the supermarket making sure you see every item on sale in the supermarket? Ever walked into new car showroom and caught that new car smell, I bet you can quickly recall the first car you bought now after thinking about this? Thats brand recognition in action, that's where you want to get your brand! Did you know MacDonalds used to get complaints that all people could smell was the grease from the food being cooked so they created their own range of "MacDonalds smelling cleaning products", smell just like touch is a sense that can draw up emotions and memories that help to generate powerful brand recognition, when used in combination with other senses you can create powerful brand awareness with you target customers.

Taste: Most commonly used in the food and drink sector taste can be another strand to your marketing and brand mix, from a fine tasing wine to the aroma of milk chocolate melting in your mouth, businesses like Cadburys, Pepsi, Tayto and many others take this very seriously as its a vital part of their customer experience and the product that they sell. Taste is another one of those senses that can evoke emotion from the home cooked meals you used to get at home to the tase of the food you eat in another country, if a brand can help you to remember these aspects of your life without you knowing it, they are successfully engaging you in their brand. In combination with the other brand senses this can also become a powerful tool for food and drink businesses.

Summary: Introducing sensory brand methods can help take your businesses emotional identity to a higher level, from considering how your brand engages with a prospect before they buy to considering how your brand engages with your customers when they do become customers. Adding these strands of emotion evoking branding can become a powerful tool to help you connect at a deeper level with prospective and existing customers.

By focusing on using the senses in combination with one another you will produce a brand that can engage with many different personas, tapping into the primal parts of the mind to help your brand standout emotionally within the marketplace.

If this article interested you and you would like to explore how to bring your brand to life through commercially focused design, animation, social graphics and brand strategy, focusing on more than just a logo, drop me an email and we can discuss your businesses brand in greater depth:

[email protected]

www.kaizenbrandevolution.com

Creating Brands That Sell: Brand Strategy, Brand Creation, Brand Evolution, Brand Launch Campaigns.