The Smell of Money: Marketers Use Scent to Encourage Spending

When you shop, you are manipulated in myriad subtle (and not-so-subtle) ways. Everything from store layout to background music to package design is carefully planned to make you more likely to part with your hard-earned dollars. New Scientist reports that marketers are now learning to “recruit smell for the hard sell“:

Scent, marketeers say, is the final frontier in “sensory branding”. Of all our five senses, smell is thought to be the most closely linked to emotion because the brain’s olfactory bulb, which detects odours, fast-tracks signals to the limbic system, which links emotion to memories. Retailers hope that making this direct link to our emotions may seduce us into choosing their products over a competitor’s. “Branding is all about how a customer feels about a company or product — it’s an emotional connection with the customer,” says Randall Stone, a New York-based marketing expert.

Because smell is so strongly linked to emotion, and because individual responses to aromas differ widely, research has progressed slowly. Plus, corporations are afraid that their customers will be upset when they find out there’s yet another way to make them spend more money.

Much of retailers’ “hush-hush” attitude stems from fears that they will be accused of subliminal marketing… They don’t want to admit they are manipulating the store environment to trigger an almost Pavlovian response in customers.

Now, however, scent marketing has reached a level of sophistication and subtlety that makes it appealing to big-name companies like Samsung, Sony, and Verizon. Sure, the scents are designed to manipulate consumers, but they do so on such a low level that most people are never aware that it’s occurring.

Several studies have shown that pleasant scents encourage shoppers to linger over a product, increase the number of times they examine it and in some cases increase their willingness to pay higher prices too.
In one recent study, accepted for publication in the Journal of Business Research, Eric Spangenberg, a consumer psychologist and dean of the College of Business and Economics at Washington State University in Pullman, and his colleagues carried out an experiment in a local clothing store. They discovered that when “feminine scents”, like vanilla, were used, sales of women’s clothes doubled; as did men’s clothes when scents like rose maroc were diffused.

I’ve read about scent marketing before, and have tried to be watchful for it, but I rarely find myself where it might be used. (Comic book stores aren’t likely to use scent marketing, though perhaps they should.) Reading this article almost makes me want to drive to a mall to do research!


Tuesday, 2nd October 2007 (by J.D. Roth)
Publicado originalmente en http://www.getrichslowly.org/

Que color es tu marca

Estas interesado ponerle un logo a tu empresa, crear tu propia marca y no sabes por dónde empezar, lo primero que debes escoger es el color de tu marca; y como haces esto sabiendo que colores comunican mas con los objetivos generales de tu empresa el color es sumamente importante ya que en ocasiones no es tan importante el logo o la imagen en si misma sino el color según los últimos estudios de neuromarketing, un ejemplo de esto es el de librerías Gandhi y los espectaculares amarillos que se apropian de nuestros espacios en la ciudad a pesar de que el logo realmente es purpura, la integración del amarillo nos hace asociarlo inmediatamente o la Big blue que es como llamamos a la gran IBM, o el Rojo de Coca-cola.

Es importante que tu marca y tu logo transmitan la esencia de lo que tu compañía hace y quiere lograr para sus clientes y los colores te ayudan a lograrlo.

Les compartimos este video con algunos ejemplos y los significados de los colores. Esperamos que los ayude a escoger bien los colores de su logo y generar marcas de impacto.

Por FIDEL CASTILLEJOS VARELA

Five Reasons Why Websites Still Matter

You know you must leverage Facebook, Twitter and word-of-mouth marketing to increase awareness of your brand. But the fact is, websites remain infinitely more popular with consumers than all of the business pages on social media sites combined.

Only 22 percent of those of us online in the U.S. visit a branded social networking page such as those found on Facebook, while 62 percent of us regularly visit branded websites, according to the latest Global Web Index report. If you were starting to let your site become outdated or haggard, consider a refresh. After all, as these figures note, websites still matter.

Here are five reasons why you shouldn't ignore yours:

1. Branding: Since it's your site, you set the design, which affords you the flexibility to optimize the user experience in ways that directly support your business model and brand-related goals. There's no competition on your website, just a branded experience that you direct yourself.
   
2. IT and Engineering Jurisdiction: When you control your own site, you have complete jurisdiction over its code, hosting environment, page count, content, plug-ins and more. Just as I mentioned above with regard to branding -- here too you have the elasticity required to make small or sweeping adjustments at will, an advantage you don't get with third-party websites. With sites like Facebook, you can change minor graphics and some content but not code, navigation scheme, server speed or the graphic user interface.
   
3. Content: Speaking of content, more of it can be found on your own website than on a third-party utility or platform, and none of it competes side-by-side for your visitor's attention. Create compelling and useful content that speaks to why someone is visiting your site and you stand a higher chance of that visitor taking action with respect to your products or services. And since inventory (i.e., web pages) is virtually unlimited on a site under your control, you have ample opportunity to add additional content and calls-to-action in the format you deem most appropriate.
   
4. Search Engine Optimization (SEO): If garnering multiple, relevant and highly positioned placements in the SERPs (search engine result pages) is part of your sales and marketing strategy, a website is a must. When properly coded and managed, your site delivers natural and sustaining search results that drive qualified traffic to the exact pages on your site where you want visitors to be.
   
5. Analytics: While many social utilities, platforms and networks provide access to data related to demographics associated with who accesses your profile and how often they do so, website analytic tools go much deeper. They can provide you with the type of business intelligence you need to determine in real-time how your online marketing performs and stacks up against the competition.

Don't think for a moment that I'm suggesting you drop social in favor of your own website. What I'm advocating is that you lead first with your website, followed by leveraging social, email marketing, point of purchase, mobile, apps and other forms of marketing and outreach to drive traffic to your website where you can generate qualified leads who convert to paying customers.

Articulo por 

Mikal E. Belicove is a market positioning, social media, and management consultant specializing in website usability and business blogging. His latest book, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Facebook, is now available at bookstores. For more information, visit MikalBelicove.com.

Publicado en Entrepreneur.com