Sight i see: effective marketing is communicated through all the sense--sound, smell, touch as well as taste.

• Author: Stephens, Jeff
• Position: Multisensory Marketing

Imagine walking into a small shop downtown while blindfolded. You can't see a thing--not a logo, piece of furniture of product, You can, however, hear, smell and touch. Your ears quickly identify the sweet sound of Ray Charles telling you how he's got Georgia on his mind, with a foreground of lively chatter. As you fumble around with your hands, you feel several display racks and rabies around you, filled with what you can tell is ceramic and stainless steel dishware, Your nose enjoys an aroma of roasted perfection. You know exactly where you are, before the barista even asks if you need room for cream.

Now take off the blindfold. You're standing in the middle of Starbucks--no surprises here--and in one of the best examples of multisensory marketing found anywhere.

Leading marketers have long since discovered that the strongest brands can be not only seen, but smelled, tasted, heard and touched. Yet most bank marketers have remained focused solely on sight alone--the way the brand looks visually. Let's examine how leading brand innovators both within and outside of the financial industry are building deeper, more differentiated brands by consciously building brand equity into all five senses thereby creating a powerful, one-of-a-kind experience for customers, employees, the community and beyond. These multisensory experiences not only tell a bank's story, they prove it with real action.

Why it makes "sense" to your bank

Your customers are people, not machines. And people love things they can interact with--and interactions are touched, heard, smelled, tasted and seen.

As if genuinely engaging customers weren't enough, multisensory marketing and experiential brand development offer several other key benefits to marketers.

For one thing, it's cost effective. Multisensory marketing is much more about thoughtful brand strategy than gigantic execution. Consider the cost of your latest traditional mass media campaign. Plenty of dollars, no doubt. Now compare that to the cost of keeping your branch stocked with freshly sharpened #2 pencils (their distinct and pleasant cedar scent, and relevance to your financial business to boot), choosing a more brand-appropriate fabric (is your brand more vinyl leather or swanky suede?) for your new office chairs, and concluding each transaction with a piece of bubble gum. Go ahead, do the math.

Also, multisensory marketing simply goes further. Your traditional media efforts are called "campaigns" for a reason...