In 2003, Martin Lindstrom approached Millward Brown, a leading and innovating global market research agency specializing in helping companies maximize their brand equity and brand performance. He had an unusual request: “Help me prove that the sensory experience of brands plays a key role in creating brand loyalty.” While our clients around the world have approached us with many questions related to the effectiveness of their brand-building and marketing activities, this one was unique. After all, we experience the world through our senses, so intuitively it seemed obvious that brands could create a stronger emotional bond by taking advantage of their sensory appeal. The question was, was there any way to prove it?
To do so we designed a two-stage research program that spanned the globe, involving hundreds of researchers and interviewing thousands of people.
Stage One: Understanding the Role of the Senses
When tackling a new and unique project like this, it is crucial to understand the mental “landscape” in which brands exist. Qualitative research, where a trained moderator explores ideas and brand associations using projective techniques with small groups of people, is invaluable, providing insights and guiding the way to a more quantitative measurement.
We conducted focus groups in thirteen countries: Chile, Denmark, Holland, India, Japan, Mexico, Poland, Spain, South Africa, Sweden, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In each country we spoke with males and females from the ages of twenty-five to forty. Our exploration focused on ten global brands: Coke, Mercedes-Benz, Dove, Ford, Gillette, Vodafone/Disney, Levi’s, Sony, Nike, and McDonald’s. Five additional local brands (which varied by market) were also included in the mix.
Our findings gave us a good understanding of the role of the senses in creating brand loyalty, and confirmed that brands with sensory depth were particularly strong, with clearly defined, globally understood, and distinctive brand identities, not to mention relevant and aspirational brand values. In some respects, these brands had deliberately built their sensory values, and were now benefiting from these associations.
Stage Two: Quantifying the Influence of the Senses
In many ways this was the most challenging phase of the research. We now wanted to prove that the memory of a brand’s sensory associations increased a consumer’s desire to buy the brand.
To do so, we created and tested a unique online questionnaire. In conjunction with our partner, Lightspeed Online Research, we interviewed over two thousand people in the United States, the UK, and Japan, who provided feedback on their sensory associations, imagery, purchase intent, and much more, for eighteen brands.
We then used a statistical methodology called structural equation modeling to test hypotheses (from stage one) on how the senses might affect brand loyalty. Several models based on the varying hypotheses of how the variables interrelate were developed for the same set of data. Each model was then evaluated by a combination of diagnostics associated with its individual paths as well as an overall goodness-of-fit index. The model with the best overall fit and intuitively sensible paths was chosen as the best representation of reality.
Robert D. Meyers
Group CEO, Millward Brown