Most marketing people are aware that it’s important for all the aspects of product marketing to be consistent. If your ad is saying that your product is used by kings and queens it’s not going to feel right if it arrives in a tatty cardboard box.

Similarly, if you make luxury claims and make the price cheap consumers will be put off by the incongruence.

But what about sensory consistency?

Do products need to be consistent in how they are perceived by each sense; is the smell and feel as important as the look?

Considerable research has been conducted on how smell can change perceptions. In one study, researchers put one new pair of running shoes in a room with a light floral smell and another identical pair in an unscented room. Afterwards 84% said they were more likely to buy the pair in the room that smelled of flowers. Yet another study found that pumping a scent into one part of casino led to people putting 45% more in slot machines.

A recent study investigated how the way a product feels can affect perceptions of it. Researchers gave identical mineral water to 1000 men and women, but varied the firmness of the (otherwise identical) cups containing the water.

Some customers are far more inclined to touch products than others; they test fruit before they buy it and are more likely to squeeze the pack of toilet roll that they pick up. The researchers assumed that these people would be most likely to have their perception of the water influenced by the cup.

But they were wrong.

However, it was those respondents who didn’t have a high need to touch products that were most likely to regard the water in a flimsy cup less favourably than that in a firmer cup.

Had the researchers been aware of the work conducted on subliminal smells perhaps they wouldn’t have been so surprised.  As I discuss in The Secret of Selling, when people are consciously aware of a peripheral environmental factor they are far less likely to be influenced by it.

It’s when the unconscious mind gets information that isn’t passed into conscious awareness that it is likely to be influenced: the conscious mind picks up the feeling and jumps at a conclusion as to why it exists (usually incorrectly).

In this case the feeling of the flimsy cup creates a feeling that something isn’t very nice, and the conscious mind that is preoccupied with the task of drinking the water assumes it must be the water that has caused that feeling.

When people take note of the cup’s flimsiness they realise they are drinking from a flimsy cup and the water’s taste is considered in isolation.

Source:  Rutgers University (2008, July 14). Touch Can Trump Taste, Even When It Comes To Selecting Mineral Water. ScienceDaily. Retrieved May 15, 2009, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2008/07/080713191733.htm

Image courtesy: Chris Zerbes