Paul Baines
Simon Harrop
Paul Baines
Simon Harrop
Paul Baines
Simon Harrop
Hi, my name is Paul Baines, welcome to Cranfield School of
Management’s Research Seminar Series. With me here today is
Simon Harrop the CEO of an agency called BRAND sense. Simon, welcome.
Thank you.
Simon, can you tell me a little bit about your agency, what it does and why it is unique?
Yes, certainly Paul. It is about understanding the relationship between consumers and the proposition that they buy into, whether it is a brand or a product or a service; and how the brands that we work with can make that relationship more deeply engaging in a holistic way across all five senses.
About four years ago when we set the business up we carried out one of the biggest pieces of research into this whole area, trying to understand from a sensory point of view how consumers engage with brands. What we found is that actually the senses are much more in balance in terms of our relationship than the traditional marketing spend has been focused. We found that there was a huge over reliance on sight – words and pictures really – and that is how marketing spend was traditionally spent.
So we are really addressing that imbalance and working towards this opportunity that you can create deep emotional engagement using all five senses and particularly that talks about sound and smell and taste – and touch as well.
Potentially this is revolutionary isn’t it? You could say well given how much expenditure is currently undertaken on sight, are you advocating almost a complete shift in the nature of the pattern of spend?
That is a good question. Ultimately, yes, of course, I would love that to be the case. I think it will be – rather than revolution, I think it will be evolution because we are learning all along. I have been in this field for about twenty years and I believe I have got a robust methodology, but to change the way brands think and marketing directors think will take time. Hopefully through things like this we are getting the message out to the young and upcoming marketers, who are seeing that this is much more central part of what they do.
But if I could persuade the big marketing brands to just divert 1% of their current marketing spend into this sensory field, I would regard that as a huge success.
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Paul Baines
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That is the point isn’t it? How do you go about making that shift?
Let’s picture for a minute me as a marketing director, why should I shift? What are the compelling reasons for me to shift my pattern of spend from sight to other elements of the sensory approach?
I think as well as getting the message out through forums like this, I think marketing directors are increasingly understanding the inefficiencies of the current model, which is really all about talk at, because of media fragmentation, because of the sophistication of consumers, the fragmentation of segments. You know, how do we segment people these days? It is much harder. So they are looking at new ways to connect.
This over reliance on visual means how on earth do we cut through and get to the consumers that we want. So we are looking at news ways of connecting; not only new ways of connecting, but also totally differentiated which is the point that you made. Because what we know is that certain senses give us the ability to cut through and go straight to an emotional platform. And ultimately, what we are really saying is that the purchasing decisions or the brands that we buy into, a large part of that is rational, but actually a huge underlying part of that is what we would call non-conscious or subconscious. And it is emotional. And it is looking for the triggers that can drive that emotional relationship between brand and consumers of what we do.
So we have a methodology that starts with understanding that emotional space; helping to define it versus your competition, identifying where the whitespace is, if you like and then identifying the sensory signals that can drive us into that fertile territory.
OK, if we are not looking purely so much at sight, and we are now looking at these other sensory areas, tell us a little bit more about what this actually means in a campaign.
Well I think if you talk about things like sound and sight, roughly speaking some of these senses are much more what we would call interpretative and they go to the part of the brain called the cortex where we are receiving those signals, we are interpreting them and we are making a value judgment.
Some of the other senses like smell and taste and to a certain extent touch, they are more intuitive and because they are intuitive they tend to be more emotional. So if you look at where we are currently spending our budget, in truth they are going more to the rational cortex part of our brain and what we are looking for is that connection to the emotional. So those other senses seem to be an interesting place to explore; so that is partly the message that we are getting across. But it is also about orchestrating the whole thing.
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So if you can bring the other senses into play and orchestrate it so that it is a holistic total sensory experience, it becomes much more powerful. That sounds a little touchy feely, but we have got some quite robust research behind it.
I can’t envisage it yet, Simon. Can you give me an example of a campaign that you have undertaken where you have brought together these different elements?
I think I can. I think perhaps the better way of looking at it is just to take an example. One example that I use quite frequently is actually in the airline industry. About ten years ago Singapore Airlines set out to own a sense of Asia and because they thought that was an integral part of their brand and there is lots of emotionality globally around what Asia means – it is that sort of sense of hospitality and service. And they wanted to interpret that. What they have done is they have taken this to the nth degree. They have got a signature fragrance; it is all about the brand. They have their colour palette that is used on board the aircraft, in their waiting lounges – even down to the detail of the colours that the cabin crew use in their make-up. The flavours that they use are all driven from this sense of
Asia. So the whole thing is totally integrated, and they did this about ten years ago without even really thinking about it; they didn’t have a sensory strategy, they just went ahead and did it.
And it is fascinating from my point of view to see that they use the same aircraft, they use the same airports, the same lines and routes
– and everything else – and yet they are consistently voted number one. I think this is what is driving it; this sense that when you go on board, the whole thing is a holistic sensory experience that just works and it is hugely differentiated. I think that is not a bad example of how it can work if you get it right.
Is it then the remit purely of a very large company like Singapore
Airlines or could smaller or medium sized companies also take a sensory approach?
I think any company that is looking for a point of differentiation can benefit from this and it need not cost a vast sum of money. You can do some quite interesting and some quite specific things at a micro level to create differentiation. Even, if you like, tactical things to look at; if you are putting on a direct mail campaign, one of the things we have been able to prove through some quite interesting research techniques in partnership with Royal Mail, was that you can almost double the emotional engagement if, for example, you put smell or sound on a piece of direct mail rather than just having it as a piece of paper. You can actually put smell on paper, you can even put sound into paper and that will actually double the amount of
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© Cranfield University emotions that are created.
We did some interesting work using FMRI brain scanning to show this emotional connection. Actually the psychologists have a term that they call superadditivity which is if you can measure the emotional connection created through one sensory signal and separately you can say it is the picture on a piece of direct mail and separately you can measure the emotion through the smell on a piece of direct mail – and let’s say visually the emotional connection is x, through smell it is x, interesting when you put the two together you don’t get two x, you get two and half, three times the emotional connection. And it is superadditivity that they talk about.
So really we are orchestrating it all and making it all work together and you have got a symphony rather than, I don’t know, the violins tuning up.
It sounds wonderful, but very complex. Is it any more complex than a traditional brand development campaign? It sounds like it might be.
I think it requires some specialist knowledge and skills, without a doubt. I have worked in the sense of smell for twenty years. But I don’t think it is any more complex; you can go back to basic marketing principles and if you think about the 7Ps as they are now, one of those is P for physical. And really we are looking at that physical; the physicality of the customer experience.
So the theory isn’t much more complex, the practice can be. You have to have some quite careful knowledge of the sensory signals and how those relate to emotions and that is sort of an interpretative skill. But there are some quite robust processes and methodologies that we can apply to that process. And part of the reason I am here is that I want to get that message out because I believe in this very much, and if we can get that message out and get the industry aware then hopefully, I talked about that 1% change in budget, if it becomes 5% then fantastic, everyone wins.
OK, clearly you have got an olfactory obsession and you want everybody else to have an olfactory obsession, but give me another example, one of your own clients perhaps who you have worked with in the past, who has really taken this approach to heart and really implemented it to its full extent.
OK, I think I have to be careful. I won’t name names, but I can talk in terms of a category. One of the brands that we are working with at the moment is an antiperspirant deodorant; it is a male product.
And in this particular area, everyone is setting out to be sexy. It is not Lynx, but if you think of the Lynx advertising it is all about getting the girl. And they have recognised that actually their competitors
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© Cranfield University are all doing this; they want to actually be a little more mature about this and they want to show it is about inner confidence. So how does that sense of inner confidence come through? How should it come through in the total product experience – and that is the pack, the product formulation and the communications?
So we are going through this process of analysing what the emotions are, analysing the sensory signals that lead to that and starting to put those sensory cues in. And so the fragrance is less about trying to say ‘here I am’ to the women, it is about who I am, either you like me or you don’t. And so we work at a really detailed level; it is about the product formulation, it is about the packaging design, it is about the communications and the branding and the visual. So it works across that whole process.
It is a real intellectual endeavour this by the sounds of it. How do you ascribe particular emotions, particular words, particular descriptions to smell?
We do a thing called perception mapping and really what we have is a knowledge bank that perfumers have developed over centuries really.
If we are talking specifically smell – this applies across all five senses, but smell for example – we know that certain fragrance compounds will elicit particular emotions in consumers pretty much universally across the globe, so we can map emotions to smell compounds.
What we can do is almost reverse that process; so once we have defined the emotions that we want our brand to own, and how we want to be perceived as different to our competition, if we build those sensory cues into that product experience then that is starting to create ownership for us of that particular emotional space.
So that is the perception mapping that we go through and we map it, that total experience, across all five senses and then we know that the sensory cues are delivering us into that emotional space – whatever it is that we choose for our brand.
So we have talked a little bit about sight and its limitations; we have talked a bit about smell, but what about the others? What about the other senses – taste for example?
Well taste is very much associated with smell, so the process for smell and taste are very closely linked. Actually we think that about
80-90% of the sense of taste is actually derived through smell and anecdotally we know that if we have got a cold – we can’t really taste our food. Actually the flavour molecules that we put into our mouth travel up to what is called the retro nasal canal at the back of our nose and we smell the taste.
So, the process is exactly the same really; if you are creating a food product and you want to differentiate that into a particular segment
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© Cranfield University or emotional state, then you can do the same process.
Some of the others are interesting, like touch. Often I think overlooked and it is quite hard to interpret often through product – although if you think of the shampoo or deodorant example it is the formulation of the shampoo. And so there has been an interesting move in terms of marbleisation of shampoos because that richer, much more luxurious feel denotes quality and there are beads that come in. So there are little things that you can do. It could be about packaging format or if you take this to a wider context in retail, it is about the materials that you use in retail design. And we go through the same analytics trying to understand what the sensory signal means from an emotional point of view and then map that to the experience that we want to create.
In coming up with a sensory marketing campaign, how do you – and this is a very different kind of approach I would guess than the one that most brand and marketing managers are used to – how do you go about evaluating the effectiveness of a campaign that uses this approach?
It is a good question. We have a methodology that we call smash your brand and that is really smashing it down, breaking it down to its component parts, trying to measure using a process that we call best way of scaling; measuring the emotionality that each of those parts create. Benchmarking, if you like. And then what we will do is analyse through this smash your brand process how we then build it all back up together. We set a benchmark when we first start of measuring the emotional connection and then using this technique, after we have rebuilt it, to see how we have moved that emotionality on to this space that we have interpreted. So we have analytical skills and processes behind this creative work, if you like, that we can use to measure the advantages and benefits that we have created.
I think it is a hugely interesting area and I think viewers and listeners will want to take this further, I am sure, but the question is if
Cranfield were a brand, what would it smell like?
That is a good question, Paul. I think I would start by asking you what the brand values were; have you created a brand architecture?
I am sure somewhere you have thought about this and you would start by looking at that architecture, understanding the values, looking at your competitors. So until we have done that, I can’t answer – sorry!
Alright, Simon, thanks very much. We will leave it there. Thank you.
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