We know for a fact that appealing to all our senses at once is likely to double the consumer’s brand awareness. Several surveys document the fact that our olfactory sense is probably the most impressionable and responsive of our five senses. Smells invoke memories and appeal directly to our feelings without being filtered and analyzed by the brain, which is how the perceptions of our remaining four senses are processed. We all recognize and are emotionally stimulated by, say, the smell of freshly-cut grass, the sea air, or the perfume of roses. And any car lover loves the smell of a new car.

Some are getting the hang of sensory appeal. There are supermarkets in Northern Europe which have installed hundreds of meters of pipeline to carry the delicious smell of fresh bread to the stores’ entrances. Upon detection of the marvellous aroma, passersby are drawn inside the shop. A major British bank has introduced freshly-brewed coffee to its branches with the intention of making customers feel at home when visiting the bank. The fragrance of fresh coffee induces relaxation in the bank’s customers, not an emotion you could normally associate with such an establishment.

But let’s not forget the other neglected senses: hearing and touch. Sound, too, evokes memory and emotion. AOL is using a voice familiar to many young web users. Fans of Brittney have discovered that they can hear her voice, not only on her CDs and videos, but also when starting up AOL. It’s Brittney who now lets you know that “You’ve got mail”. Kelloggs has also invested in the power of auditory stimulus, apparently testing the crunching of cereals in a Danish sound laboratory in order to upgrade their product’s ‘sound quality’.