Unwrapping Memories: The Power of Sensorial Experiences and Emotional Attachments in Consumer Research.

I just bought my kids one of my favourite childhood storybooks. My Gran used to read it to me from cover to cover when we visited for summer holidays. After scouring the internet I found a vintage copy of it and it’s just been delivered… I must admit I was nervous to open it. I haven’t seen it since 1994 when she died. Would I be disappointed by it? Would the characters be unappealing and the stories boring?

But instead I’ve been flooded with the warmest feelings, like something really special has just happened.

One of the stories was a highly sensorial one about a sweet shop. Looking at the pages today, I can clearly remember the intersection of imagination and sense as I imagined what those sweets would taste like. My mouth almost waters now as the story still manages to evoke those same imaginings today.

Until I re-read the story today, my memory of that book was non-specific. I even doubted if it was the right one until it arrived through the door. What I remembered was a feeling of warmth, cuddled up with my gran in the early hours of the morning while my parents slept.

The human memory is a truly fascinating thing. When I opened that book today, every part of my sensory memory was stirred; I remembered the story, my imagination, my engagement, asking her to read that sweetshop story over and over.

There is a reason brilliant brands deliver a whole brand experience. Sure it makes their customers feel special, but it’s also, and perhaps more importantly, creating a sensorial experience, which embeds the brand in their memory. The crinkling sound of unwrapping tissue paper. The haptic click of a magnetic clasp. The smooth glide of your hand over a matt box.

I’m sure you can imagine exactly what I mean just on reading those fairly generic touches, so imagine what you could do with truly evocative imagery and language, alongside experiences that stir the senses. Some brands have built that into their product so convincingly, they don’t even need their consumers to physically experience it – see the Coke campaign: “Try not to hear this”. (Google others, it’s an incredible campaign.)

Coca-Cola: TRY NOT TO HEAR THIS

Humans don’t buy your product or service in isolation. Their decision to buy is based on a (random) collection of experiences that become the mental connections they draw to your brand and eventually form their impression of your brand. The more connections and the more emotive those connections, the stronger the relationship with the brand. I’ve always imagined this like those expanding ball toys (which I only recently learnt was called a Hoberman Sphere.)

A Hoberman Sphere represents the emotional attachments and mental connections consumers have with a brand. This is not new news.

But when we’re doing consumer research, I think it can be forgotten. We ask about their brand impression, or their user experience but we leave out that often these brand impressions are much more complex and emotive than logical or easily articulated. We ask would you buy this or recommend that but we’ve left out what existing attachments they have and how this may affect their likelihood to buy.

I once interviewed a girl who, having done extensive research, had concluded that Broadband Provider B was definitely the better option: faster, more cost effective and, for a little more money, the TV add-on was decent. However, she chose Broadband Provider A, because as a teenager she had aspired to have that provider. Logically she knew it wasn’t the best option, but when it came to voting with her wallet, she chose emotionally. 

A survey would struggle to capture that, but so would a focus group. What enabled that truth to emerge was story-telling – she was simply telling us a story about her relationship with broadband providers; not what she thought of each of them. But it was an insight that reframed how my client thought about themselves in relation to their competitors and then in turn how they built their strategy.  

Strategy wasn’t the objective of the research; we’d set out to understand drivers of decision-making. Had we asked directly why she bought Broadband Provider A, I genuinely don’t believe we would have heard the same thing from her. I don’t think it’s only because we like to think we’re more rational than we are. I think it’s because we don’t realise how much our emotions influence our decisions.

This revelation speaks to the essence of human decision-making—emotions matter. I see it time and time again in research. And there’s plenty of evidence supporting this, journal articles and whole books dedicated to this topic.

From a marketing perspective, it underscores the importance of delivering sensorial experiences that resonate:

-       Deliver a sensorial experience, across the consumer journey from interest to post-purchase

-       Don’t just talk about functional attributes – sell the benefits and lifestyle that goes with it

-       Make consumers feel something, even if it’s physical (like the Coke ad)

But to achieve that successfully, consumer research needs to do the same thing to find out what really makes people tick, how effectively your efforts are connecting with them, what’s really driving them to engage. We need to tap into the incredible data source that is the human mind of a consumer and build out the full Hoberman Sphere.