The document discusses how the five senses - sight, smell, sound, touch, and taste - shape consumer behavior and impact advertising. It summarizes the key points made by several speakers at a conference on this topic. Sight is the dominant sense but can be manipulated, while smell has strong power to draw attention. As audio interactions increase across devices, brands must ensure recognizable sound. Touch can increase likelihood of purchase, while taste is a multisensory experience influenced by other senses like vision. Combining multiple senses effectively, like Dunkin Donuts did with smell and sound, can increase engagement and sales.

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How Senses Shape
Consumer Behaviour

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How Senses Shape Consumer Behaviour
It is easy to focus on creating compelling messages designed for the screen, and forget
that consumers experience our advertising in a multi-sensory environment – they may be
watching our ad but distracted by any multitude of external factors. The theme of a
recent Warc & Walnut Unlimited Brainy Bar event - How Do Senses Impact Consumer
Behaviour – offered a great opportunity to reconsider the wider context within which we
consume advertising. As Walnut Unlimited’s Cristina de Balanzo explained on opening the
event, “our senses are our guide to the world,” and while our focus might be on one thing,
our other senses are always at play, and may shift our focus at any stage - “Our bodies are
filtering a lot of information.”
As advertisers, we have a huge opportunity to consider the world in a more holistic way;
as Dr. de Balanzo expressed it: “senses make the world meaningful.” Here’s what we learnt
about the big five:
SIGHT - IMPLICATIONS FOR PACKAGING
Dr. Tim Holmes, Director of Research at Tobii Pro Insight (previously Acuity) took on the
topic of sight; the sense that is considered by many to be the most dominant of the five
senses in terms of its impact on the brain. This means that in general, what we see, we
believe. However, “vision is a highly hackable sense… we can manipulate visual attention
and perception.”
Dr. Holmes explained this in the context of packaging and point of sale; the way we
perceive colour is relative, we adapt the way we understand colour based on the context
around it – so something can look white until it’s compared to something that is even
lighter. For some brands, such as whitening toothpastes, this really matters – “If you want
to sell a product that’s going to convince people it will whiten their teeth, you had better
make sure it’s the whitest thing on the shelf,” he quipped. At point of sale, brands need to
stand out and be easily definable; you look for a brands most definable characteristic,
such as the predominant colour of the packaging, and “the brain will complete an image
for you based on a limited amount of information.”
USING SCENT TO DRAW ATTENTION
Dr. Andy Myers, Director at Walnut Unlimited explained that he sees scent as “the
gateway to emotion.” He pointed out that certain scents can transport you to another
context, no matter where you are – no other sense has this power.

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How Senses Shape Consumer Behaviour
Retail is dominated by sight, sound, and to a degree, touch; meaning there is still a huge
opportunity to consider smell. Scent has an immediate impact but erodes over time and
can be therefore brilliant for orientating attention. This is used to great effect by
cosmetics retailer Lush, who uses scent to make it almost impossible for shoppers to walk
down a British high street without becoming aware of the location of the nearest Lush.
Scent is very undervalued as a brand asset – you take 960
breaths an hour, that is 15,360 opportunities for your brand
every waking day,
BRANDING IN AN INCREASINGLY AUDIO WORLD
Steve Keller, CEO, IV Audio Branding explained that audio branding is much more than
just an audio logo, as we might be aware of when we interact with Intel or turn on an
Apple computer. Almost all brands will increasingly have to consider a wide variety of
audio interactions, factoring in the quality of sound across channels from tinny mobile
speakers to digital virtual assistants such as Siri or Alexa. Brands have quite a challenge
ensuring they sound recognizable across devices - “we are moving into a world of audio
only… how are brands being managed in that space?”
As humans, “we are quite literally wired for sound” – we respond to sound much quicker
on reflex that we do for senses such as sight, which is possibly an evolutionary adaption
to the fact that we would have heard threats before we saw them.
This is one of the reasons that sounds can have a strong unconscious impact on our
behaviour – a study on wine shoppers found that when French music was playing in the
background, 77% of wine that was sold was French; when German music was playing, 73%
of wine purchased was German; however, people didn’t tie their purchases to the music.
USING TOUCH TO CONNECT WITH PRODUCTS AND STAFF
Professor Charles Spence, head of the Crossmodal Research Laboratory at Oxford
University pointed out that touch is the biggest sense; skin is 18% of our body mass, and it
is full of tactile receptors that pick up on all kinds of sensations, including pressure, pain,
temperature and movement.
Touch can create a sense of ownership, Professor Spence explained; if consumers pick up
a product, they are four times more likely to buy it. This means that retailers need to “put
things where you want people to touch it, at a level they want to touch it.” Professor

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How Senses Shape Consumer Behaviour
Spence spoke highly of Gap’s Touch Tables, which have soft jumpers at the perfect level
for touching. However, he did warn that many brands might have a challenge getting
people to engage with their products through touch: “We’re told in museums not to
touch… touch is forbidden!” When products have a tactile quality, they need to make it
clear that touching is encouraged.
Professor Spence also offered illuminating advice for those in service industries, by talking
about the power of seemingly accidental touches on increased tips and a higher likelihood
you will follow their recommendations. He referenced the CEO of Pret-a-Manger, who
once explained the power of body language on business metrics: “The first thing I look at
is whether staff are… smiling, reacting to each other, happy, engaged? I can almost predict
sales on body language alone."
TASTE AS A MULITSENSORY EXPERIENCE
Jozef Youssef, Founder and Chef Patron at consultancy Kitchen Theory, looked at how
the senses interact in taste - “Flavour is a construct of the mind, rather than a chemical
experience in the mouth.” What we experience as taste is often what we expect to taste,
based on our previous experiences. For him, this knowledge has huge implications for
product design in food, for instance, can we lower sugar contents by increasing the role of
other senses, such as colour? As Apicius, the 1st Century Roman famously said, “We eat
first with our eyes”; what we see in particular can drive the sensation that we think we are
experiencing in our mouths.
He explained that we expect more and more from our food, which is “one of our only
basic needs {but also] a marker of all sorts of celebratory occasions.” His explanation for
this was that in the past “for good or bad, we had more rich sensory experiences” – for
instance, using fire for warmth. Today, we seek rich sensory experiences, and food is one
of the first senses we turn to.
WHEN SENSES INTERACT
Although the speakers were each briefed to talk about an individual sense, it was clear
that the interplay of the senses is where experiments can get particularly interesting.
Dunkin Donuts famously engaged multiple senses in Seoul, South Korea, by putting
atomisers on public buses that sprayed the smell of coffee in time with the sonic trigger of
Dunkin Donuts adverts. This was supported by visual posters at stops near Dunkin Donuts
shops, and led to a 16% increase in traffic to the stores, and 29% increase in sales of
coffee.

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How Senses Shape Consumer Behaviour
There was however, some debate about the role of congruency in how we experience the
senses. Dr. Myers explained that “Congruency leads to more effortless thinking;” if the
smell, colour and taste of something aligns, it is very easy to understand the experience,
and, as in the Dunkin Donuts example, congruency can lead to increased desire to engage
the sense that is not being stimulated. However, several speakers explained that
incongruency can be a good thing in certain contexts, as it makes an experience more
memorable. For instance, Kitchen Theory worked with Nest to remind people to test their
fire alarms, creating ice-cream flavours such as Burnt Toast, Marmalade and English
Breakfast tea, but mixing up the colours to create a more incongruent, and therefore
memorable, experience.
WHAT THIS MEANS FOR ADVERTISING
So there is a lot for brands to consider with creating powerful experiences beyond the
screen. On top of the above, brands also must consider that the way that we each
interpret the senses is unique; as Dr. Holmes explained, “A lot of the way that we
understand the world [comes from] the way the brain perceives.” But if brands get it
right, if they manage to stimulate multiple senses in the right way, brands can create the
ultimate memorable experience.

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How Senses Shape Consumer Behaviour
If you are interested in learning more about the subject of this article, please contact
Sarah Emmerson, Insights Planner, emmersons@bbdoknows.com,
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