Byu study: how taste, touch and sound affect when you buy.

• Position: Around Utah - Report

Provo--There's a reason marketers make appeals to our senses; the "snap, crackle and pop" of Rice Krispies makes us want to buy the cereal and eat it. But as savvy as marketers are, they may be missing a key ingredient in their campaigns. New research finds the type of sensory experience an advertisement conjures up in our mind--taste and touch vs. sight and sound--has a fascinating effect on when we make purchases.

The study led by marketing professors at BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY and the University of Washington finds that advertisements highlighting more distal sensory experiences (sight/ sound) lead people to delay purchasing, while highlighting more proximal sensory experiences (touch/taste) lead to earlier purchases.

"Advertisers are increasingly aware of the influence sensory cues can play," said lead author Ryan Elder, associate professor of marketing at BYU. "Our research dives into which specific sensory experiences will be most effective in an advertisement, and why."

Elder, with fellow lead author Ann Schlosser, a professor of marketing at the University of Washington, Morgan Poor, assistant professor of marketing at San Diego State University, and Lidan Xu, a doctoral student at the University of Illinois, carried out four lab studies and a pilot study involving more than 1,100 study subjects for the research, published in the Journal of Consumer Research.

Time and time again, their experiments found that people caught up in the taste or touch of a product or event were more likely to be interested at an earlier time.

In one experiment, study subjects read ad copy for a summer festival taking place either this weekend or next year. Two versions of the ad copy existed: one emphasizing taste ("You will taste the amazing flavours ...") and one emphasizing sound ("You will listen to the amazing sounds ...").

When subjects were asked when they would like...