Our senses fuel our perceptions of the objects and events that surround us. Yet as marketers we're often limited to just two of them—sight and sound. How much more compelling could brand experiences be if we used the science of perception to design better, more persuasive interactions—taking into account all of our senses? In our latest white paper, we explain how an experiential approach harnesses the science of the senses to create more effective, more engaging experiences that amplify your message and brand.

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Experiential
coding
The science behind
experience design

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Introducing
experiential
coding
As marketers, we’re in the persuasion business, yet psychology and science
rarely enter the conversation.
Doesn’t this seem strange?
If we want to become more effective at changing consumer behaviour,
why don’t we delve deeper into behavioural economics? Or gain a clearer
understanding of what attention is, and how it works, so that we can help
brands “cut-through” the clutter?
We live in a time of great advances in many different fields. This is creating a
new reality for brands, and a deeper understanding of the unconscious forces
that shape how we think, feel and behave. It simply makes sense to combine
these forces with people’s inherent desire for stimulation and engagement to
create better experiences for brands.
At Jack, we’re not cognitive scientists; we’re in the business of creative
communications. But we do use science to better connect people to brands.
We’ve been codifying and distilling the research available, so that we can
build better experiences by applying these insights in a systematic way.
We call this approach experiential coding.
Lewis Robbins
Associate Strategist

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73%
of UK and US millenials
crave experiences that
stimulate their
senses.
JWT Report, 2013

4. The new science
of the senses
Many brands have a blind spot when it comes to the
senses. As marketers, we’ve been trained to think in
terms of images and words—thus the old “art and copy”
model of the Mad Men era.
It’s almost too obvious to say that we live in a
multisensory world. Our senses are the bedrock of our
experiences; they’re rich, vivid, immediate. The more
they are stimulated, the more memorable an experience
will be, because they activate more of our brains. A
single scent can stir the emotions and take us back to a
forgotten place. Stimulating the senses stimulates new
ways of thinking, feeling and behaving—so just think
of what brands can accomplish by taking a more multi-
sensory approach to designing their brand experiences.
This paper focuses on how harnessing a scientific
understanding of all the senses can create more
effective, more engaging experiences. Forego the
dominance of sight and sound, trigger all the senses,
and you’ll lift people’s imaginations—and your brand.
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5. How?
Based on years of
experience in designing
and tracking the
effectiveness of brand
experiences, we see three
key ways that brands can
leverage the new science
of the senses to impact the
feelings, understanding and
actions of their customers
and influencers.
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Intensify
Engage multiple senses to
create more memorable
experiences
Evoke
Stimulate senses that build
emotional relationships
Embody
Use sensory metaphors to
show what your brand
stands for

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Thinking about your
brands in terms of
pictures, not just
words, is really
powerful, but why
wouldn’t you use all
the senses? Three-
dimensional marketing
is about a more
holistic view of what
your brand stands for
and is about.
Nik Keane, Diageo

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Intensify
Engage multiple senses to
create more memorable
experiences
Evoke
Stimulate senses that build
emotional relationships
Embody
Use sensory metaphors to
show what your brand
stands for
Have you ever wondered
why fish and chips never taste
as good as the time you ate
them by the seaside out of
paper? It’s because our taste
buds are intrinsically linked to
our other senses. It’s not just
about what we taste, but also
what we see and touch.
Press release announcing Heinz’s
collaboration with “food architects“
Bompas and Parr.

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Intensify
Engage multiple senses to
create more memorable
experiences
Science has demonstrated that experiences become
more intensely memorable when multiple senses
are triggered in concert. As a practical matter, our
senses overlap, blend together and combine to
create our experience of the world; understanding
how senses can work together represents an
opportunity for brands.
The food industry presents an excellent case study of exactly this
“cross-modal” nature of the senses—and indeed, a team of scientists
at Oxford University have studied how contextual perceptions frame
our experiences of food. Among the Laboratory’s findings:
Touch
Weight and materials matter. Yoghurts eaten with a silver
spoon taste creamier and more expensive than those eaten
with lightweight imitation cutlery.
Sound
The lab found that we associate higher notes with sweetness,
and lower notes with bitterness. Adrian North of Heriot-
Watt University found that background music influences wine
tasting. Three groups drank the same wine, but assigned
different characteristics based on the pitch and tempo of the
background music they heard.
Colour
Desserts eaten from white plates were rated as 10% sweeter
than those served on black plates. When the laboratory
teamed up with researchers at the Polytechnic University of
Valencia, they found that orange cups deliver the most intense
flavour of hot chocolate; cream cups scored highest for aroma
and sweetness.

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Intensify
Outside the food industry, several brands
demonstrate an apparent understanding of
this cross-modal quality of the senses. We all
experience a level of synesthesia, a phenomenon
where “cross-wiring” in the brain means that one
sense triggers another, so people may “taste” scents
or “see” sounds. It may have been the inspiration
behind an interactive experience that promoted
Sonos wireless systems in both New York and the
Sonos headquarters in LA, bringing to life their
tagline of “Fill Your Home with Music”. Colours
and animations, generated by the music, were
projection-mapped onto four minimalist rooms,
creating a multisensory exploration that enabled
participants to see music and hear colours.

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Intensify
Hero your product to
create an unforgettable
experience
When Bompas and Parr created The
Tasting Rooms for the Guinness Storehouse
in Ireland, the taste of Guinness was at
the centre of every design decision. They
worked with flavour scientists to define
the environmental factors that served
to enhance taste perception, creating
customised soundscapes and the vaporised
scent of hops, barley, malt and wheat. In
The Velvet Chamber, where visitors learn
to drink Guinness correctly, the taste and
texture of the beer was translated into
“sensual and luxurious” design language.

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Intensify
Engage multiple senses to
create more memorable
experiences
Evoke
Stimulate senses that build
emotional relationships
Embody
Use sensory metaphors to
show what your brand
stands for
The [McLaren Technology
Centre] emotionalises my
brand. I asked Norman
[Foster, British Architect] if
he could conceptualise the
idea of a mental aftertaste. I
wanted it to be 90% NASA,
10% Disney… No one
comes to the building without
being blown away. And the
environment in which you
design or work is critical to
the mindset.
Ron Dennis, McLaren

12. Evoke
Stimulate senses
that build emotional
relationships
We know intuitively that there’s a connection between
sensory stimuli and emotional response, and it only
makes sense that brands can leverage positive
associations to evoke emotions around their brands.
Of course emotions are inherently subjective—
but there are multiple practical applications
for experience design, particularly in physical
environments.
Light
Philips have developed a lighting system for schools where teachers
can create the right ambiance for different daytime activities. Four
different lighting scenarios—Normal, Focus, Energy and Calm—
have been created by combing different wavelengths and intensities
of light, supporting the rhythm of activity within the classroom.
Scent
Scent is the only sense that has a direct line to the limbic system, the
part of your brain that processes emotions. Lemon scents have been
found to increase concentration, whilst orange and lavender scents
have been found to reduce anxiety and improve the mood of dental
patients. Hotels leave lavender sprays on your pillow to help you
sleep.
Colour
Blue has been shown to increase creativity, (hence perhaps the
dreaded phrase “blue-sky thinking”) whereas red inhibits creativity
but amplifies our ability to identify errors.
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13. Evoke
A deeper understanding of the senses is inspiring
designers to create new touchpoints that can cater to
previously ignored psychological needs. For example,
dedicated “mood spaces” are disrupting typical
customer journeys and creating a new kind of value
for the customer.
“Mood Spaces“
“Switchrooms” in the luxurious ShinQ shopping
centre in Japan help female audiences shift mindset
from work to play, or vice versa. Soft lighting, gentle
colours, soft, curved furnishings and 3D surround
music create a comfortable, immersive atmosphere.
Visitors can also browse art, browse and apply
cosmetics, or experience an “air-shower” booth.
In Selfridges’ “The Silence Room”, shoppers can
shelter from the bustle of the street in a calm
environment, where no mobile phones are allowed.
Subdued, coloured lighting and soft grey furnishings
create an ambiance that promotes a meditative calm,
helping people to unwind. In a hyper-stimulating
world where attention is a finite resource, creating
such calm spaces can be an important part of the
customer journey.
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14. Intensify
Engage multiple senses to
create more memorable
experiences
Evoke
Stimulate senses that build
emotional relationships
Embody
Use sensory metaphors to
show what your brand
stands for
“We understand abstract
concepts like morality and
understanding by mapping
them to more concrete
concepts.”
Cognitive Scientist,
Benjamin K. Bergen
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15. Embody
Use sensory metaphors
to show what your brand
stands for
Brands are adept at telling stories through traditional
media. But many brands struggle to translate these stories
into an experience. It’s hard to turn abstract concepts—
honesty, integrity, progress—into something tangible. And
so for a century or more, communications professionals
have typically told people, rather than shown them, what
the brand stands for.
Yet science has uncovered again and again how sensory
stimuli convey values and abstract meaning far more
powerful than words—creating metaphors in people’s
minds that represent a neglected but potent resource for
brands.
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16. Embody
Morality = Verticality
Moving up and down is the ideal scaffold for understanding morality. Virtue is up,
depravity is down. Good people are “high-minded”; some perhaps “look down”
on bad people, who are “underhand”. Crucially, what we experience with our
bodies can drive our actions. Schnall cites the findings of an experiment which
took place in a shopping mall, which found that people who had just moved up
an escalator were more likely to donate money to a charity box than those who
had just moved down an escalator.
Difficulty = Harshness. Ease = Smoothness.
Priming people with physical sensations can influence a person’s perception and
decision-making. In another experiment, volunteers perceived a social interaction
to be more difficult if, before undertaking it, they handled puzzle pieces covered in
sandpaper. Here, the physical sensation of roughness maps to disagreeability (so
metaphorically think of a “rough” day vs. everything going “smoothly”.)
Affection = warmth
People holding a warm cup of coffee will use warmer language to describe their
interaction with a stranger than those who aren’t. The increase was 11%. Another
experiment showed that people who had been socially excluded estimated the
temperature of a room to be lower than those who hadn’t. This is borne through
metaphors like “warm-hearted”, “cold-hearted”, “an icy stare”.
Weight = competence, seriousness, importance
The sense of “weight” becomes an embodied metaphor for seriousness,
respectability and trustworthiness, as evinced by an experiment that showed that
people gave more “weight” to CVs that were presented on weighted clipboards.
This example also highlights the importance of context—as weight can also denote
burden, responsibility.
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Research in the field of cognitive science holds the
key to how sensory design can lift your values of your
brand from behind a screen, and bring your story
into the living, breathing world. According to Simone
Schnall of the Cambridge Embodied Cognition and
Emotion Laboratory, these “embodied metaphors”
are “a common language of the mind… the building
blocks of perception, cognition and thought”.

17. How to translate
values into experience
Explicit description
[conscious, rational, abstracted, forgotton]
Implicit understanding
[unconscious, emotional, embodied, remembered]
Identify your
values and
differentiator
Microsoft wanted
to communicate
that Windows8 was
“Fast and Fun“
For the Nike Free event in
Beijing, Japanese agency
Supernature wanted to
celebrate freedom of mind,
body, and self-expression
1
Identify the
metaphors that
surround it
So they translated the
“speed“ of the OS into
physical movement - fast,
slick, and fluid.
They made use of
metaphors surrounding
freedom - bright, weightless,
gentle, spacious
2
Translate these
into embodied
experiences
And build a gigantic slide
in a shopping centre
The result, “Free Oneself“,
was a large, illuminated
glass cube, full of white
downy feathers, which
people gathered in their
arms and threw into the air
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What’s
next?

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A new era of
sensory marketing
It doesn’t feel overly grand to assert that we’re living in a new era of sensory
marketing. The more digitally driven communications become, the more potent
and special multi-sensory engagement will feel.
And look at our culture: the most celebrated art of recent years has been
immersive, encompassing, engaging and yes, multi-sensory. Experiences that
move beyond visual spectacle to create a more total experience have proved
wildly popular with the public. Think of Olafur Eliasson’s “Weather Project”
(2003) at the Tate Modern, or Random International’s Rain Room (2013) at
The Museum of Modern Art, or United Visual Artist’s “Momentum” (2014) at
the Barbican. If you have any doubt that brands are drawing inspiration from
these cultural expressions, just look at Tropicana’s Trafalgar Sun installation.
So what’s next for brands?
We’ve always believed that creativity drives great business. And every fresh
insight into how we’re governed by the senses opens up new ways for brands
to engage people. Harnessing and applying the science of the senses can
take brands in creative directions that make brand experiences more beautiful,
unforgettable and effective than ever before.
Lewis Robbins
Associate Strategist

20. Talk to us
Contact
Melinda Lindland
SVP, New Business and
Group Account Director
melinda_lindland@jackmorton.com
Read our blog at
blog.jackmorton.com
Follow us on twitter @jackmorton
Visit us online at jackmorton.com
About Jack Morton
We’re a global brand experience agency.
We generate breakthrough ideas,
connecting brands and people through
experiences that transform business.
Our portfolio of award-winning work
spans 75 years across event marketing,
sponsorship marketing, promotion and
activation, experience strategy, employee
engagement, digital, social, and mobile.
Ranked at the top of our field, Jack
Morton is part of the Interpublic Group of
Companies, Inc. (NYSE: IPG).
More information is available at:
www.jackmorton.com or @jackmorton
© Jack Morton Worldwide 2014
Want to learn more about experiential
coding? We’re happy to share more
from the JACK Codebook, a resource
we use to design better experiences—
just drop us a line, and look for more
white papers on new experiential
coding topics in the months to come.
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