Customer Sense: How the 5 Senses Influence Buying Behavior

by Aradhna Krishna

Overview

An insightful look at how touch, taste, smell, sound, and appearance effect how customers relate to products on a sensory level, and how small sensory changes can make a huge impact. Customer Sense describes how managers can use this knowledge to improve packaging, branding, and advertising to captivate the consumer's senses.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781349344420
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan US
Publication date:	12/23/2015
Edition description:	1st ed. 2013
Pages:	185
Sales rank:	661,053
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Dr. Aradhna Krishna is the Dwight F. Benton Professor of Marketing at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, USA having previously served as a faculty member at Columbia University, New York University, and the National University of Singapore. Her work on investigating how consumers respond to changes in pricing, promotion, packaging, and branding has been cited in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune, the Huffington Post, and on NPR. She has had numerous articles published in venues such as the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Economic Theory, Journal of Consumer Psychology, Management Science, Journal of Retailing, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Experimental Psychology, and the Harvard Business Review. She is the senior area editor for the Journal of Consumer Psychology and an area editor for Management Science, and she sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Marketing Research as well as the Journal of Consumer Research. She has also worked with companies such as Best Buy, Procter & Gamble, Dell, and Hallmark.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1. Vision 2. Audition 3. Smell 4. Taste 5. Touch Conclusion

Editorial Reviews

Though we live in a wired age, information still comes to us through only five senses. Advertisers are faced with the task of understanding and manipulating how a consumer receives information through these senses. It is this interplay between how we receive and process information (consumer psychology) that Krishna, a marketing professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, examines in depth. Krishna dedicates a chapter to each sense, providing a brief physiological overview before analyzing the relationship each sense has to marketing and customer choice. The writing is fluid but uneven; psychological sections flow easily into those about consumer behavior while more scientific sections remain conspicuously dense. Illustrations and optical illusions throughout help demonstrate the way perception and choice interact, and display how changes in presentation impact a consumer’s impression and consumption of a product. Using examples, Krishna highlights how advertising and marketing tactics manipulate a consumer’s senses. The book would have benefitted from a focused discussion of the way Internet marketing has changed this advertising landscape. As an overview of the myriad aspects of advertising, the book works well. But practical application requires a more thorough text. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

"A sophisticated, easy-handed elucidation of the practice of marketing to our senses." - Kirkus

"Marketers have been using sensory experiences to help promote brands for many years to varying degrees of success. It seems to be a hit or miss proposition. In this groundbreaking book, Customer Sense, Aradhna Krishna shows how the science of senses works and how marketers can effectively use smell, taste, touch, vision, and sound to develop and promote any brand or product. This book should be on every marketer's and product developer's shelf." - Jennifer Aaker, Professor of Marketing, Stanford University

"The sense of smell is our most evocative and emotional sense. Scents can trigger memories and emotions that are deeply meaningful and inspiring - your favorite childhood toy, the moment you fell in love - and can change our behaviors and alter our moods. In Customer Sense, Dr. Krishna explores how smell and the other four senses interact with consumers to influence our attitudes and opinions about a product. This book is for anyone who is looking to connect with customers at a multisensory level and where their most fundamental motivations lie." - Rachel Herz, PhD, Author of The Scent of Desire, Adjunct Professor, Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior, Brown University Medical School

"Customer Sense opens up new windows into the many ways we perceive brands at the deepest, most fundamental levels. It will increase your marketing insight fivefold, one sense at a time, with practical ways to maximize the full range of customer experience." - Douglas Van Praet, author of Unconscious Branding: How Neuroscience Can Empower (and Inspire) Marketing

From the Publisher

Krishna (Marketing/Univ. of Michigan) examines the relatively new idea of sensory marketing, which "engages the consumer's senses and affects their perception, judgment, and behavior." The study of sensory marketing may be in its infancy, writes the author, but its use, intentional or otherwise, has been around for years, including such sensory signatures as the royal purple dye of the city of Tyre, Tiffany Blue and the pink of the breast cancer campaign. Krishna is clearly beguiled by sensory marketing, and she manages to convey that fascination by concentrating on each sense in turn, explaining how it works and giving sharp examples of how it has affected marketing. Her touch is light as she tackles how marketers make use of visual bias, cultural preferences for certain colors, packaging designs that move our feelings, the impact of a spokesperson's voice or the music in a store, the dance of brand names and sound patterns, the different desires people bring to the need for touching, the connections among smells, emotions and recollections, and the fashioning of food design to taste buds. When the author digs deeper--into the mechanics of the senses, the innate and learned views of smell perception, how taste is "an amalgamation of all of our senses that combine with…those receptors on the tongue to form a perception of an object on our mouth"--she still treads lightly, at least for the most part. Nor is she immune to the pleasures of the more whimsical ploys: scratch and sniff, the crunch of Rice Krispies, the role of heft in food products. Despite some dry prose, Krishna presents a sophisticated, easy-handed elucidation of the practice of marketing to our senses.

Kirkus Reviews