Branding and Sensory Awareness: Theory and Case Study of Abercrombie & Fitch

Résumé du document

According to Lindstrom, the author of ‘BRAND sense', brand sense is the integration of the five of the senses – touch, taste, smell, sight and sound. The five senses play a key role in the brand creation and retail experiences. In fact, people's senses usually influence their choice, for example, people choose fresh and avoid rotten food by smell. Or the great vision and sound effect of movie preview excites people and they choose to buy cinema tickets to enjoy it.
On the other hand, human beings can use at least five tracks- image, sound, smell, taste, and touch to contain data as these five senses directly involve with people's emotions and all that they entail. In addition, the human being's senses link to memory and can tap right into emotion. As Lindstrom mentioned that “events, moods, feelings and products in humans' lives are constantly imprinted on their five track sensory recorder from the second we wake to the moment we sleep.”
Since distinctive brands pursue differentiated experiences to offer their audience, they employ sensory channels to deliver their message and evoke people's emotions. However, it is not possible to put products and services through each sense into an ad and deliver to public. Therefore, marketers need to create their own sensory experiences through different channels to gain people's attention.

Extraits

[...] Ezra Fitch was one of his regular customers and joined the company in 1900. She believed in the future of the business and it was important to bring the outdoors to more of the general public. In 1904, Abercrombie and Co. became Abercrombie & Fitch. Then, the company evolved physically from downtown to midtown of New-York but also developed its products by introducing sportswear apparel for women. But between the late 60's and the 80's the company struggled financially and was finally purchased by the Limited Inc. in 1988. [...]

[...] According to Lindstrom (2005), there are 40 percent people who make perfume purchasing decisions based on the design of the bottle. By the same token, Absolut vodka has used sight sense successfully by introducing attractive bottles, in fact, bottle is representing the brand. In addition, Apple also used sight sense to make consumers be interested with them. An example of this is iMac would show its famous apple mark from the splinters of smooth plastic in bright transparent colors when iMac is working and iPod as well As a result, the color of Coca-Cola, the contour of Absolut vodka bottle, or the curved line of Apple, each component creates these brands combined with their overall design, using sight sense to differentiate their brands from others ) Sound Sound is one of the senses, which can recall our past experiences through our memory and evoke our emotion (Soloman, et al., 2007). [...]

[...] These receptors are stimulated by light, color, sound, odour and texture (Soloman, Dann, Dann, & Russell- Bennett, 2007). Since sensory receptors have gathered senses from stimuli, it would create three stages of perception process, which are exposure, attention and interpretation (figure 1). Figure1: An overview of the perception process Source: Soloman, Dann, Dann, Russell-Bennett, (2007, p41). Consumer Behaviour. Sensory system is playing an important part in people's daily life. It generates people's sensory experiences when they encounter different situations (Soloman, et al., 2007). [...]

[...] They do not take effort to differentiate from the others. Most advertising campaigns do not bring something striking to the consumers' mind. Lindstrom showed that the consumers could remember 34 percent of the advertising shown on TV in 1965, whereas the consumers could remember only 8 percent in 1990. This may be due to the fact that people are spending less time for watching television, reading magazines and listening to the radio. This explains why many advertising campaigns have failed to reach customers satisfaction. [...]

[...] (Brand Sense Martin Lindstrom, Build Powerful Brands Through, Touch, Taste, Smell, Sight, and Sound 2005.) To explain the effect of experience, I would like to say Marcel Proust has searched for lost time, in the first volume of the novel ‘Ways at Swann'. Involuntary memory is a concept made by the French writer Marcel Proust in his novel In Search of Lost Time. Proust contrasts involuntary memory with voluntary memory. The latter designates memories retrieved by "intelligence," that is, memories produced when we put conscious effort into remembering events, people, and places. [...]