700 eggs, 14 bags of flour and 26 pints of milk.

Pancake Day! A day celebrated by many in the United Kingdom where we all sit down to eat and enjoy pancakes after dinner, sharing photographs over social media of what each other had and discuss what your favourite topping is between friends. 

In marketing terms this day can be considered as a ‘ritual’. A ritual is “a set of multiple, symbolic behaviours that occurs in a fixed sequence and is repeated periodically” (Soloman, 2010, pg. 614). Pancake Day (or Shrove Tuesday) is a Christian festival that happens on an annual basis and is the day before Lent begins, when you are meant to give up certain foods/activities for 40 days. 

Marketers use these rituals as a marketing tool to engage with consumers. This Pancake Day saw Centre Parcs getting involved with consumers by promoting their restaurant The Pancake House.

The Pancake House in Sherwood Forest took part in a Guinness World Record of “Tallest Stack of Pancakes in the World” and succeeded building to the height of 101.8cm, which used 700 eggs, 14 bags of flour and 26 pints of milk. The attempt to build this tower took 45 minutes and around a month worth of planning and training. 

By using this day to provide an experiential event, where the audience could eat the pancakes after the tower had been created, Centre Parcs are using this as a free marketing tool. On Pancake Day, everyone will be talking about it and if a company takes part in a ritual that a lot of people take part in, they will have interest in to reading what the company is doing around this ritual. This will boost the company’s image and recognition, in hope that people talk amongst friends about the event and who ran it and spread word around this company. Which is a form of free marketing by word of mouth. 

Below is the video of the Pancake House at Centre Parcs in Sherwood Forrest building the pancake stack, enjoy!

References

Soloman, M. (2010). Consumer behavior. [S.l.]: Pearson Education.

Thornton's Chocolate Taste Pod.

At the end of January the popular chocolate company Thorntons launched a campaign to get the public trying out their new Continental collection.

The company have just begun the re-launch of a chocolate collection, the Continental Collection, which includes five new flavours for people to try. Thorntons took this opportunity to create a sensory experiential marketing approach which was a Taste Pod situated in Thornton in London’s Westfield Stratford store. 

The taste pod is aimed to identify which of the Continental range is perfect for you, the consumer! (And obviously promote the new product). All you had to do was come inside the taste pod, sit in a comfy chair, and take part in a tasting session to find out your ideal balance of flavours to identify which chocolate is best for you. At the end of the experience the consumer was given a sample product of the chocolate that was most suited to them, which could be consumed either in the taste pod or taken away.

This experience for consumers is considered as a multi-sensory brand experience as there are more than one of the five senses being used in this campaign (Hulten et al, 2009). The experience has our sense of sight, sound, smell, touch and taste all being used. 

The main sense being used is the sense of taste as it is the most important to this campaign as it is all about finding out what taste is best for the consumer, whether it is salty, sweet, or bitter.

The sense of taste is said to be the “the most distinct emotional sense and often interacts with other sense” (Hultén, 2011) which is why it is important to involve this sense in experiential marketing as it will create value towards the product for the consumer and will also enhance the brand image value. Taste is also considered to relate to smells, feels and sounds, not just the flavours (Hultén, 2011), which is important when relating to the consumer’s experience due to the larger the range of senses that are used in a campaign the stronger memory will be created. 

As well as the sense of taste, the pod features ambient lighting, music and scents to add to the sensory experience. Hultén (2011) discusses that the sense of sight is most powerful when it comes to identifying new goods or service or changes in these and is the most common sense for perceiving these. He goes on to further discuss that the sense of sound and smell are both used to create emotionally links between experiences and the consumers and are a strong method of creating memories. 

This campaign uses these senses is taking the consumer on a ‘taste journey’ to find what is best for them and giving the consumer an experience and a memory. All of the sensory experiences are shaped around the consumer and their preferences and in the end they receive a free gift, all of this creates strong image resulting in the company gaining positive brand image for the future.

References

Hulten, B., Broweus, N. and van Dijk, M. (2009). Sensory Marketing, Palgrave Macmillan,

Basingstoke.

Hultén, B. (2011). Sensory marketing: the multi‐sensory brand‐experience concept. European Business Review, 23(3), 256-273. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/09555341111130245