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

Derren Brown's Psychological Theme Park Ride

Derren Brown launched an experiential campaign to promote the opening of his new theme park ride, which will be opening March 2016, which involved two life-sized (extremely creepy) dolls.

His new 13 minute theme park ride is said to be the first ‘immersive psychological attraction’ designed to ‘manipulate the human mind’. His method to launch this new theme park ride was to send two life-sized dolls out around London one early morning across the Northern Line on the London Underground, reportedly playing with a toy train set at Hamleys and pushing an empty antique pram along Tube platforms. 

The stunt was aimed to create a taster of what his new theme park ride will be like, and Derren Brown has said that he will be using this theme of Victorian in his work, and reflects the idea that we are “moving toward a future where theme park attractions not only give you a physical experience but also play with your mind and the concept of what is real”.

This experiential marketing campaign is creating a memory for all of the commuters that saw these dolls. Due to the appearance of the dolls of them being created as creepy Victorian dolls, which look very out of place, will create a memory in the mind of all of the commuters that see them. 

Starbucks Red Cups

Christmas brings many traditions back that we see companies take part in annually, and Starbucks Red Cups are one of these. As part of the launch of these iconic red cups making an appearance again, the popular coffee shop chain Starbucks created a four-metre high installation made to look like a Christmas tree, created from Starbucks red cups.

The installation was erected in Kings Cross’s train station in London and required customers to tweet in with the hashtag #RedCups and share their red cup moments with pictures. This idea of sharing images and tweets on twitter and Instagram was linked to their social campaign where they wanted customers to tweet their experiences throughout the Christmas period. With each time the hashtag being displayed a limited edition emoji of a Red Cup would appear.

This campaign in London aim was to involve their customers passing by asking them to tweet with #RedCups and the more tweets that were submitted the more the Christmas tree lit up. This campaign is an example of Sensory Marketing as Starbucks were promoting their festive drinks over the Christmas period, by using the human senses to market their product. 

Vision, the four metre high installation was used to attract the attention of consumers. The installation was situated in the middle of a busy London train station and is hard to miss by all commuters passing by. Consumers that were attracted over and took part in these campaign were presented with a gift card from Starbucks to use over the Christmas period, as a way of thanking their customers. As well vision, smell is another sense used. The installation was designed to smell like Starbuck’s product, the Gingerbread Latte, which is a limited edition drink at this season and is a popular drink for this company. 

This smell is something that is aimed to stay in the thoughts of the consumer in hope that they remember about this product later in the day, potentially whilst passing a Starbucks, resulting them in buying a product.