The Future
LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE, BRANDING IS EVOLVING. Over the next decade the dialogue within my industry will shift from better print campaigns and more catchy television commercials towards a whole new path. This much I know: Brands will have to stand out, beat their chests, assert uniqueness, and establish their identities as never before. Sure—traditional advertising channels will continue to hold sway, but they’ll have to exist alongside other, nontraditional channels, which are mushrooming as fast as technology allows. Airwaves and cyber-highways are gridlocked with so many messages that sometimes it’s hard to find a voice in the jam.
Fifty years ago David Ogilvy, Bill Bernbach, and Stan Rapp transformed how most of the world perceived advertising. Recently, though, we’ve undergone a digital revolution. We have more channels than we can change, and more websites than we can browse. We have mobile phones, PDAs and Skype, the Internet, and electronic games, CDs, and DVDs. We have phones that snap photos, and animated images at our fingertips. We can interact with machines and people across the world in real time.
What we’re witnessing is the emergence of the interactive consumer. By now an entire generation (or two) has grown up with mouse in hand and using a computer screen as their window to the world. They respond to, even demand, shorter, snappier, quicker, and more direct communications.
A Few Predictions …
Over the next decade, sensory branding will be adopted by three categories of industry.
1. The sensory pioneers. Automobile manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies will lead the way in sensory focus and innovation over the next decade.
2. The sensory adopters. Telecommunications and computer industries are both fighting for definition and differentiation. After all, who can tell them all apart? They’re most likely to look to the automobile and entertainment sectors for inspiration.
3. The sensory followers. A broad variety of industries including retail and entertainment are more likely to trail than to lead.
What does it take to move into the world of sensory branding? Each and every industry has the potential to adopt a sensory branding platform. Right now, some are way ahead, while others are way behind.
Sensory Pioneers
The Pharmaceutical Industry
Drug companies have a limited number of years of patent protection on their products. After that, those patents are game for anyone to copy, and they are being copied. A steady stream of generic drugs is emerging out of Asia. What’s more, tighter restrictions are being placed on pharmaceutical promotions. Marketing departments may find that sensory branding provides the base they’ve been looking for to create a brand new platform—and a new shot of loyalty from their consumers.
Taking advantage of consumer loyalty by means of the tactile feeling of its products, packaging, colors, package design, as well as the brand’s distinct sound, aroma, and flavor can provide a pharmaceutical company with a whole new arsenal for bonding with customers. Regulations in some countries challenge traditional trademarks on the shape and color of medication, but so far, no government has rejected a trademark on smell or taste. That opens up a welcome vista for companies that can count on a lifetime trademark, instead of a patent with a set expiration date.
The Automobile Industry
Sometimes it’s hard for leaders of the pack to stay ahead of the pack. The car industry is now moving into the final phase of innovative sensory branding. They’re working on a host of new sounds for seat adjustments, gearboxes, rails, indicators, hazard warnings, horns, and electric windows as well as designing a low-noise, branded-sound car cabin.
Today, every possible component of a car that represents a sensory touch point is being scrutinized, evaluated, and branded. Soon, every car brand will have its own branded smell, a branded tactile feeling, as well as its own distinct sound. It won’t be long before each component will be trademarked as “exclusive” to the car model and brand. After which the manufacturer can take its trademarked components to market and extend them across … well, Route 66 and beyond. Porsche already has a diverse variety of products on the market. If you want, you can buy anything from Porsche umbrellas to Porsche glasses. These sensory touch points become the primary point of contact and connection—which goes a long way towards explaining why people who are Porsche aficionados are prepared to pay up to 40 percent more for a Porsche laptop than for any other brand.
The Telecommunications Industry
The global struggle for telecommunication dominance is reminiscent of the car manufacturers’ struggle in the mid-twentieth century. Again, Asia has taken a back seat to Europe and the United States in terms of innovation, this time in the cell phone industry. Then again, Asian manufacturers are poised to bring high-standard multisensory perspectives to their new offerings.
Every aspect of the mobile phone, from the tactile qualities, design, and display to the branded sounds that hiss and beep when consumers use the phones, down to the smell of the product, will be evaluated, enhanced, and improved over the next few years. An example is Immersion, a company whose technology allows you to “touch” someone over the phone. According to BBC online, “The company has been talking to mobile manufacturers to build in touch into future phones.”1
The Computer Industry
Computers have borrowed the term “Sound Quality” from the automobile industry. This marks only the beginning of the race to gain the competitive advantage in every aspect but the size of the microprocessor.
Apple and Bang & Olufsen are providing the inspiration for a computer industry that’s only recently become preoccupied with style and design. It’s about time, too! Computers are also focusing on sound. Next up are the tactile elements, followed by the smell of the equipment (I happen to love the smell of a new computer). In the same way it’s become standard to take advantage of that “new car” smell, computer brands will shortly be coming up with their very own versions.
In contrast to countless other industries, technological innovations are already built in to the product. Soon computers will be manufactured with a capacity to handle sensory channels (remember those fragrant emails I told you about earlier?). Since 400 million people around the world switch on a computer each day, computer engineers are focusing on the mouse to potentially house the multisensory “brain.” Sony Corporation is working on it as we speak.2 There, a team of experts, including a psychologist, is developing a mouse that will make the user “feel” what it’s pointing to on the computer screen. The mouse could be installed on any Windows-based computer, and could deliver images, text, and animation directly to a user’s fingertips. Although engineers are designing this technology primarily for visually impaired people, the potential for other applications—namely sensory branding—is enormous.
Sensory Followers
The Food Industry
However we feel about tampering with the genetics of what we eat, you’ll be reading a lot about “food design” in the next decade. Sure—taste will always be important, but the Brand Sense results show that smell and appearance rank equally strongly on consumers’ scale of importance.
The food industry is unlikely to leave things as they are today. They will persist in designing the smell of the product and the sound of the packaging, as well as controlling the sound your food makes when you eat it. They will tamper with the color and the flavor, creating new levels of sensory preference. Tweens will like their ketchup green and their Sprite turquoise.
In our contemporary urban society we’re more familiar with picking apples from supermarket shelves than from trees. Few among us would ever be able to identify an apple leaf. Although most consumers savor the aroma of what they believe is real leather, a generation ago they were introduced to a fake leather smell that they now take as the real thing. The altered, artificial world appears more authentic than the real world! Technology has enabled companies like Nestlé, Coca-Cola, and Carlsberg to add aroma to packaging on the supermarket shelf. The issue of authenticity will determine how far this industry can go before it runs into a consumer backlash.
The Fast-Moving Consumer Goods Industry
The fast-moving consumer goods industry (or FMCG for short) category includes everything from toilet brushes to pens. Some industries within this category will be able to navigate the sensory path more handily than others. Through the work of designers like Terence Conran and Philippe Starck, everyday items have become increasingly visually sophisticated. The next step? Distinguishing your scent and sound from the other guy’s. To survive in this new sensory-defined landscape companies will have to take their cue from more advanced industries and try to maintain a lead in their own.
The Travel and Hospitality Industry
Up until the close of the twentieth century, the hospitality industry was one of the most innovative leaders in the sensory branding department. But financial crises, SARS, terrorism, swine flu, a tattered economy, and a general wariness about travel have been stalling their lead.
Only a few hotel chains—like the Ritz-Carlton—are maintaining their sensory focus. The Ritz’s lion logo can be found on door handles, cake towers, soaps, and slippers. Yet despite the general loss of focus, the chains will remain innovators, with the Asian groups— particularly the Singaporean ones—at the forefront.
The travel industry has taken a hit all around. Budget airlines have forced regular airlines to cut their branding budgets down to nothing. Despite various crises, a few airline companies—Cathay Pacific, Singapore Airlines—have managed to keep their sensory touch points alive. Interestingly, these two companies have shown the clearest signs of recovery, which places them in a highly exclusive league of profitable airlines.
The Financial Institutions
As banks merge and grow, the consumer becomes increasingly insignificant, creating an ever-widening gap between institution and, well, you and me. Only a human touch can reestablish the bond, and sensory branding will create one of the connections.
As everyone knows, the banking retail environment has become increasingly automated. Costs have been passed on to consumers, who prefer dealing face-to-face rather than conducting their transactions through ATMs, the telephone, automated websites, and voice machines. In stark contrast, other retail businesses have chosen the opposite strategy, creating cozier, friendlier, lighter, more welcoming and, well, better branded environments.
Financial institutions now deal in commodity products. The days of a friendly manager with a reassuring smile and a warm handshake are fast disappearing. Customer loyalty in today’s banking environment is frankly unstable. Sensory branding may be the banks’ only route back to a human-centered environment.
The Retail Industry
Retail has made steady strides in sensory branding over the past decade. First, music was introduced in some stores, then environmental designers altered stores’ layouts and décor, and today, they’re making use of aromas. Problem is, apart from Abercrombie & Fitch, all this sensory progress is nonbranded. Very few chains are developing their own branded sound, tactile-designed bags, or packaging. But over the next couple of years we should see this trend reverse itself.
Technology will also push retailers in the right sensory direction. What’s up next? Sonic branding: sonic logos incorporated into packaging that will play branded tunes when you open them. Nonbranded sonics are already hard at work: Just as the escalators in the Hong Kong airport inform you when it’s time to step off, a voice will appear out of nowhere in your supermarket to let you know when the next checkout line is available.
The Fashion Industry
In 2002 Prada revolutionized dressing rooms in its Soho store in New York City by installing “smart” closets. Smart closets scan a customer’s individual, electronic chip-based clothing tags and then send the garment information to an interactive touch screen in the cubicle. The customer can then use the screen to select other sizes, colors, or fabrics. The screen also displays video footage of the garment being worn on the Prada catwalk.
Retail and fashion have come together to create an entertainment experience, using technology that communicates via an increasing number of senses. Today, microchips are able to identify an “anticolor clash,” which informs female (and even male) shoppers if a new piece of clothing matches their existing wardrobe. Once consumers commit to buying an item, a chip will politely inform them the best way to take care of it.
As far as sensory branding goes, the fashion industry is fast catching up to the perfume industry—which is a good thing.
The Entertainment Industry
Increasingly, more merchandising programs piggyback on the movies that show up at your local cineplex. More than one film has a corresponding ride in a theme park (think Pirates of the Caribbean ). The entertainment industry is doing fantastically well in the sensory branding department. Will it last, though? On average, a film has a financial lifespan of six months. When the box office declines, the ride or game will lose its relevance, making it hard to justify a permanent Indiana Jones or Harry Potter ride in Disneyland or Warner Brothers World.
The sensory branding integration among movies, cinemas, merchandising, theme parks, and events is very often questionable. More than three thousand items of merchandise reside under the Harry Potter umbrella, and share little in common except that they’re made in China and brandish the Harry Potter logo. Harry never invented his own smell. Neither was he characterized by a special sound, touch, or taste. Harry Potter merchandise appeals only to the eye. It has no sensory links to the movies, the rides, or even J. K. Rowling’s seven magnificent books. Nope—Harry Potter gear is just more merchandising, which probably won’t extend beyond the franchise’s lifespan.
Computer games are fearlessly venturing into a whole new sensory universe via technology. Many games seek to simulate the real world. Tetris, the ever-popular 3-D game, will soon be reformatted with surround sound and tactile stimulation. There are more than 100 million eager gamers out there, providing all the motivation inventors and technology companies need to import and convey as many sensory touch points as possible.
Over the next few years the computer gaming industry will push mass sensory communication even further by rolling out a variety of mice and joysticks to a world where roughly 30 percent of computer game aficionados are in front of their consoles several times a week.
Real tactile experiences are already a reality. The Immersion Corporation has released TouchWare Gaming, which the company promotes as a “Touch sense technology [which] can transform any game into a multi-sensory experience by engaging your sense of touch.” TouchWare Gaming is already for sale to consumers. With it, you can “feel your light saber hum” and “your shotgun blast and reload.” You’ll also know if “your missile locks on a target” or if your car’s “driving over cobblestones.”3
With its stylish black paint job, the Nostromo n30 mouse looks like any other rollerball computer mouse. However what you see is not what you get, because this mouse is embedded with TouchWare technology. In sync with the visuals on the screen, the mouse whirs through a palette of vibrations, which make their way to your fingertips. Sony PlayStation’s game controller offers a different type of feedback—known as “rumble“—which allows gamers to feel every bump, impact, and crash in whatever game they’re playing. The SideWinder Force Feedback 2 joystick from Microsoft even supports force feedback—which is the sensation users experience in their hands as they play certain games.
The World’s Top Sensory Brands
Based on input from focus groups across the world, our Brand Sense study analyzed the world’s top brands from a sensory excellence perspective. Among the two hundred most valuable brands according to Interbrand, it became clear that very few take advantage of their sensory potential. Fewer than 10 percent of these brands, in fact, demonstrate anything close to a sensory branding platform, although five years from now, this figure will be up to 35 percent.
We used the following criteria to assess the twenty most valuable brands:
The most intriguing revelation? The majority of the top twenty brands that take advantage of a multisensory platform have even more potential than what we’ve seen to date. Louis Vuitton’s steady growth of merchandise gives it free rein to ensure a four-, if not five-sense appeal. Nokia’s steady growth of digital channels represents even more sensory opportunities (including the company’s icon, sound, and navigation features). Gillette needs to focus on their inconsistencies in tactile and aroma-based signals, and Starbucks still has a long way to go to capitalize on their sensory appeal in their many stores, where their own lines of merchandise tend to be neglected—and where it today is a fact that their customers, according to the Brand Sense study, don’t relate a distinct taste to Starbucks at all (other than that sour milk smell we talked about before).
FIGURE 7.1 Top 20 sensory excellent brands. Which brands can today be considered the world’s top sensory brands? An extensive evaluation of the world’s 200 most valuable brands reveals the members of the exclusive club.
But This Is Just the Very Beginning …
Even if you can tick every sensory box for the brands you love, claiming that every sensory aspect of your brand has been fulfilled—well, it’s far from the end of your sensory story. From my perspective, there’s every indication in the world that branding will move into even more sophisticated realms, namely brands that not only anchor themselves in tradition, but also adopt religious characteristics and use sensory branding as a holistic way of spreading the news.
FIGURE 7.2 Top 20 brands with the largest untapped sensory potential. A range of top brands has so far missed out on the sensory potential—this includes this list covering the brands representing the largest untapped sensory potential.
NASA named its first space shuttle The Enterprise, thanks to 400,000 or so requests from Star Trek fans all around the world. Star Trek, after all, was more than a television show. It evolved into an all-enveloping brand with a religious following, complete with its own language, characters, sounds, and design. Remember: very few brands have succeeded in turning customers into evangelists—and from Apple to Harley-Davidson to Prada, customers’ lifelong belief in a product or company forms one of the most essential building blocks in creating a triumphant brand.
Highlights
Fewer than 10 percent of the world’s top brands demonstrate a sensory branding platform, although within the next five years, this figure will jump to 35 percent, a development that will take place within the following three categories of industry:
1. The sensory pioneers. Over the next decade, the automobile and pharmaceutical industries will lead the way in sensory focus and innovation.
2. The sensory adopters. The telecommunications and computer industries are both fighting for definition and differentiation in their rivals. For inspiration, they’re most likely to look to the automobile and entertainment sectors for inspiration.
3. The sensory followers. This, a broad collection of industries including retail, Fast-Moving-Consumer-Goods and entertainment, is more likely to trail than to lead.
The future of sensory brands will be evaluated on the following criteria:
From what I can tell, there’s every indication that branding will move into even more sophisticated realms that not only anchor themselves in tradition but also adopt religious characteristics and use sensory branding as a holistic way of spreading the news. After all, when you think about it, could there be anything more smashable?
