Exploring the unconscious way senses influence the customer experience

Why should the sound of a creaking door make people rate their back as feeling stiffer? Why should sitting in a blue room with soft carpet, gentle music and a lavender fragrance make customers more likely to accept higher prices for buying a car?

These are both examples, among many hundreds of studies and experiments, that highlight how the behaviour of humans is shaped by external influences that we are completely unaware of at a conscious level.

These sensory influences - smell, touch, sound and sight - can deliver both subtle and marked effects on what we do, how we feel and on both the major and minor decisions we make in our lives; from deciding which car we’re going to buy to what pair of socks to put on in the morning.

As Dr Tasha Stanton, from the University of South Australia’s School of Health Sciences in Adelaide, the scientist leading the study on back pain, explains: "The brain uses information from numerous different sources including sound, touch, and vision, to create feelings. If we can manipulate those sources of information, we then potentially have the ability to influence the way people feel." 

Can it really be that different smells, sounds and colours can change our behaviour and override what I’m sure most of us believe is the conscious control we all have over our decisions? Here are some examples that highlight just how much we don’t realise about why we do things.

1. Smell

In a study of customer behaviour in bookshops in Belgium, researchers found that the smell of chocolate, which previous work has shown positively influences people’s mood encouraging them to stay longer and browse more, increased the purchase of all books, but particularly romance and cookery books which customers were almost six times more likely to buy.

2. Sound

We’ve already discovered that the sound of creaking can heighten the feeling of back pain, but music too has an influence on customer behaviour. Studies have shown that the tempo of music played in restaurants affects how long we stay in them – the faster the music the less time we stay, which has obvious implications for fast food outlets versus expensive Michelin-starred eateries.

Studies have shown that the tempo of music played in restaurants affects how long we stay in them – the faster the music the less time we stay.

Another classic experiment in a supermarket demonstrated that when stereotypical ‘French’ music was played in the wine section, sales of French wine increased dramatically, but when ‘German’ music was played, it was the German wine sales that rose significantly.

3. Colour

Many studies have shown that the colour red has a positive effect on people’s behaviour – those who submitted a picture to an online dating site were more likely to be selected if they were wearing red. Another study, investigating the colour of painted walls in rooms, showed that whereas red enhanced people’s performance on detail-orientated tasks, green and blue walls encouraged people to be more creative.

4. Touch

It appears that what we touch and what we sit on can also affect how we behave. Researchers found that when we touch hard objects and are then asked to judge people, we’re more likely to be ‘harder’ in our opinions of them. Taking this further, in a negotiation to buy a car, those people who sat on a hard chair were far more inflexible in their haggling, literally playing hard-ball in the discussions.

Marginal gains

Why should this be the case and what are the implications in the commercial world?

To make sense of the world and guide you through it, your brain uses external sensory cues to try and match things together and take the ‘best’ course of action, so smell – the oldest human sense – exerts a big influence of how we feel about an environment and event.

Matching smell and sight actually influences our perception of an event – we actually smell rose scent more strongly if we see a red rose, and many restaurateurs (most notably Heston Blumenthal) have used smell and sound to enhance the flavours of the food they serve.

We have carried out lots of customer experience research that shows how changing sensory elements of a customer experience can deliver significant ‘marginal gains’, including the impact of what sales staff wear (its colour and style); different fragrances and colour in different retail zones to encourage browsing or buying; the use of music to speed up or slow down customer flow through certain areas; and the use of different floor materials to influence buyer behaviour.

Science shows that customers can be influenced both positively and negatively by all kinds of unconscious sensory influences during their buying journey. Most of these they will be completely unaware of, so asking them will never get to the truth.

What’s needed is better investigation of the marginal gains that can be made depending on the particular part of the customer journey they are experiencing – and using that knowledge to design customer experiences so that not only do customers feel better (increasing ‘dwell time’, driving purchase, loyalty and retention), but businesses reap the benefits in terms of sales, profit and customer satisfaction.