Martin Lindstrom must have felt his ears burning yesterday. At the ESOMAR Fragrance 2007 conference in Paris yesterday, three of the first four presenters (myself included) mentioned his book BRAND sense. David Thompson, CEO of mmr research worldwide, even went so far as to say that Martin should be thanked for bringing “a much needed focus on the world of sensory branding.”

Of course, David neglected to mention that Millward Brown designed and conducted the research behind BRAND sense, but I was able to make good on that oversight. The premise behind my presentation was that the senses play an important role at both of the P&G moments of truth.

As I’m sure you know, the first moment of truth occurs in the store, where shoppers make up their minds about a brand. This “moment” typically takes just a few seconds—just about as much time as it takes to notice a product on a store shelf. Brief though this opportunity may be, there is a lot of evidence to suggest that scent or fragrance can have an important impact on this initial decision.

While the first moment of truth is critical to generating trial, it is the second moment of truth that should be even more important to marketers. As the 2002 P&G Chairman’s Address stated, “The second moment of truth occurs two billion times a day when consumers use P&G brands. Every usage experience is our chance to delight consumers.” So while the first moment of truth is an opportunity to encourage trial, it is the second moment of truth that determines continued brand loyalty and repeat purchase.

The research conducted for BRAND sense confirms that memories of the sensory brand experience do have an important role to play in encouraging brand loyalty. The stronger, more positive and differentiating people’s sensory memories are of a brand, the more likely they will be to consider it for repeat purchase. Click here to download my presentation. (I was also interested to learn earlier in the week that Ipsos is now presenting their take on the importance of the senses. The person who told me was amused that the people presenting had not even heard of the work we had done for BRAND sense.)

The conference was more interesting and better organized than many I have attended in the past. With the focus on fragrance, I had not expected to find so much of interest. Across an eclectic set of presentations, a couple of common themes emerged.

First, marketers must find ways to maintain differentiation in the face of increasing competition and growing retailer power. Diana Dodson, Euromonitor International, provided a comprehensive review of the global fragrance market which highlighted the following points:

• The $35 billion fragrance market is growing fastest in the BRICs.
• By contrast to these fast-growing markets, Western Europe and North America are growing more slowly, with markets characterized by high churn rates, a proliferation of brands and stagnating prices. The typical fragrance brand has a two-year lifespan.
• The mass market is growing and retail marketing is blurring the line between fine fragrances and the cheaper end of the market. As premium brands are increasingly placed alongside the mass brands in pharmacies and mass merchandisers (and discounted along with them), this trend may be tough to reverse.
• Celebrity fragrances, which have proved successful at attracting new, younger consumers, add to the instability of the market. As the celebrity goes, so too does the fragrance. The brand Shh… from Jay Goody suffered as its namesake fell from public favor and the brand was withdrawn long before its two years were up.

In her presentation, Diana suggested that consumers are getting fed up with the frivolities of the rich and famous and that there might be a backlash against celebrity brands on the horizon. David Cousino, global category director at Unilever and chair of the session, suggested that these celebrity brands, which are focused on image and not the “juice,” were “dumbing down” the market for fragrance in general. In effect, the presence of cheaper brands which smell OK trains younger consumers to judge brands on price, not scent.

For my part, I doubt very much that people will lose their fascination with celebrities any time soon. And if the fragrance houses don’t want their consumers to become scent illiterate, they must break their addiction to volume sales and find compelling propositions that justify a price premium.

The afternoon sessions were given over to discussion of tools and techniques companies might use to craft the sensory experience of their brands, both to create more attractive and alluring scents and to ensure synergy between the juice, packaging and advertising. Many of the presentations focused on non-verbal measures of emotional response and some examined the role of synesthesia, making use of the metaphorical cross-over between senses to better understand people’s response to a brand. I particularly liked the down-to-earth, academically-grounded work presented by Peter Cooper and Brooke Binder of CRAMQiQ. Their small-scale experiment with getting respondents to describe scents in terms of flavors, textures, colors, and styles of music seemed to hold real promise for understanding why consumers react as they do to a brand, and whether consumers’ understanding of a brand matches that of marketers.

The stimulus material used by Peter and Brooke included both pictures and words to  represent each flavor, color, or texture. For music, they found that words alone were enough to summon up the appropriate idea. When I asked Peter about this over a coffee break, he admitted that they used both pictures and words to “remove any ambiguity” inherent in the image.

And that was when I realized what was bugging me about many of the techniques presented – why I’d been annoyed during a rather trite interactive session earlier in the day in which I was asked to choose one image from a set of nine to describe my mood. The evocative strength of images can turn them into a weakness when they’re used as research tools.

I now realize why a picture is worth a thousand words. It is because a thousand different people will use a thousand different words to describe any given picture. A picture of a dolphin may bring the idea of purity to mind for one person. To others, it may represent speed, grace, power, intelligence, or freedom. Pictures can evoke so many different ideas that they may not be the best way to capture emotional response.

David Thompson, like Millward Brown, recommends the use of words alone to elicit people’s emotional response to brands and advertising. As David says, language has evolved as our primary means of (conscious) communication. Our understanding of images and symbols is far less developed, making them an inefficient means of communication. Anyone who has played Pictionary knows this to be true! This is not to say that the images and symbols do not have the potential for implicit communication, or that they have no diagnostic value. I simply suggest that if you want to know how someone feels, a list of carefully chosen words will serve the purpose with far less fuss.

Do you recognize common issues facing your brands in the description of the fragrance markets problems? And what do you think about the use of words and images to research emotions? Please let me know.

Tags: Millward Brown, Nigel Hollis, sensory branding, Martin Lindstrom, Brand Sense, Esomar, Scent, Fragrance, Cramqiq, Peter Cooper, Brooke Binder, Moment of truth

This entry was posted on Friday, November 16th, 2007 at 2:36 pm and is filed under Brands, Research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Print this Page