What does your brand smell like?

Starcom MediaVest’s Steve Smith says brands should augment experiences with sensory impacts – with what he calls ‘cultural synaesthesia’. So how can brands makes it work?

You’ve probably heard of synaesthesia. It happens when a person’s sensory pathways are linked up so they experience things like taste when they see a colour or sounds when they see a shape.

To those of us who don’t experience synaesthesia, this sounds kind of odd. I mean, see the colour green and hey presto, taste a banana.

But there is another kind of synaesthesia – cultural synaesthesia. This is about cultural associations around sounds, colours, smells and so on. See, hear, smell or touch one thing, then experience something else.

Take ‘white’. In our western culture, white signifies innocence and purity. Hence white is the colour of baptisms and wedding dresses.

Red is another colour with cultural associations. Researchers at a university in Germany had people taste wine served in black glasses under different coloured lighting – red, blue, green or white. Although it was the same wine, the participants said it tasted 50% sweeter in red light.

These kinds of associations seem natural. But it’s when we look at other cultures that we see this isn’t the case.

In many cultures, people associate white with death. People wear white to funerals in China. Hindu ‘holy men’ in India cover themselves with white ashes to signify their death to worldly things. Though brides in Japan may wear white, it signifies her dying to her family.

These illustrations show that many of the associations we consider natural are in fact created. There is nothing inherent in associations with white or red, just as there’s nothing inherent in blue’s association with sadness – ‘feeling blue’. It’s just that in being cultural, they are shared and thereby seem obvious.

For brands, the opportunity is to exploit cultural associations – cultural synaesthesia – to create advantage.

Take Cadbury’s. In 2012, the chocolate brand won a legal battle to trademark the purple wrapping of Dairy Milk. Why purple? Culturally, purple already had an association with luxury and rarity. It goes back to when purple was used exclusively for royalty and aristocracy. Its exclusivity during Roman times was such that someone daring to wear purple could be severely punished. The message is that Dairy Milk equals luxury and exclusivity.

Done very successfully, a brand will exploit a colour – in this case purple – to attach itself to the meanings given to that colour, but then turn it so that the colour signifies the qualities of the brand.

This is what I mean. Take Tiffany Blue. Tiffany’s trademarked its unique shade of Tiffany Blue in 1998. But it has already been using Tiffany Blue since 1845. It was selected by founder Charles Lewis Tiffany for the cover of Blue Book, Tiffany’s annual collection of handcrafted jewels.

He likely chose it because of the popularity of turquoise gemstones in 19th-century jewellery – and hence beauty, elegance and rarity. Now this association is largely forgotten. Tiffany long surpassed this association so that Tiffany Blue is now associated with the beauty, elegance and preciousness of Tiffany.

However, exploiting positive associations is only one half of success. Success is garnered only if those associations trigger a positive response in people. Cultural synaesthesia needs to enhance – to augment – people’s experiences of the brand.

Emotion is probably the most valuable experience for brands, and smell is widely considered to be the most emotional of all the senses. When we smell something, we almost always immediately experience a feeling associated with a memory that can go as far back as childhood.

Perfume and cologne brands regularly use magazine inserts that are impregnated with their scent. When Starcom created the Mr Kipling Christmas cake slices campaign last year, it used smell together with the other senses of touch, hearing and taste to augment what would have otherwise been a straight forward bus stop advertising poster based on sight alone.

As people approached the bus stop then they heard carols playing and smelled the aromas of cinnamon and oranges coming from the top of the display. By pressing a button on the poster, they would receive a Mr Kipling Christmas cake slice.

It doesn’t take much of a leap to associate the smells of cinnamon and oranges with a Christmas cake. But a department store brand could use cultural synaesthesia of these aromas in its display of Christmas decorations or around its gift counters to create a positive, emotionally familiar and warm environment

So, what are some of the things brands need to understand in order to augment people’s experiences?

An obvious place to start is, what are people’s sensory responses to your brand already? When they see your ads, or when they smell your retail site and products, what associations do they make and what things do they feel?

I recently saw an ad for a luxury car. One thing that really struck me was the thud of the car door shutting. It sounded solid, and created associations of safety and good build. The feelings it conjured were of confidence and security. Job done.

And the colours you use? How do people respond to them? What do they associate with them? How do they make people feel? A study into the colours used in the logos of the world’s top 100 brands (by brand value) found that 29% use red, 33% use blue, 28% use black, and a huge 95% use only one or two colours.

Tiffany may have its unique shade of blue, but there’s significant room for colours other than red, blue and black.

To answer these questions, you’ve got to do your research. Which brings us to another issue. Sure, there’s a lot written about the semiotics of colours, shapes, logos and so on, that brands often use. You can use these. But to me, these accounts tend to be very standardised and inflexible, allowing very little for difference between people.

Take the examples of the colours white and red above. Useful perhaps if your target audience is fairly niche and homogeneous, but rapidly changing demographics are likely to impact people’s responses.

The Tiffany example shows there can be real power in surpassing existing meanings around a colour, smell or whatever to make them uniquely yours. Other brands that have done this include Nike, with its swoosh, and Starbucks, with its mermaid.

People report the Nike swoosh makes them feel powerful, inspired, ready to act, whilst responses to the Starbucks mermaid logo include feelings of warmth, comfort and good mood. In each case, something visual augments experiences of the brand – going running, drinking coffee, shopping, seeing its ads – by stimulating positive experiences right now.

Yet these examples only tend to work if the brand has already ‘walked the walk’ – if people have already had positive experiences of these brands and their products. Tiffany Blue, the Nike Swoosh and the Starbucks mermaid work to stimulate something positive right now, but mostly because people have already had good past experiences.

If past experiences are poor, this isn’t likely to happen. Therefore brands need to work hard to make sure they can back up their sensory experiences.

Brands need to create positive and uplifting experiences for people, but which are augmented with sensorial elements that have strong positive cultural connotations. In so doing, they are likely to multiply brand love, customer journey actions and brand advocacy.

Now, doesn’t that smell good?