The Analysis of Implementation of Sensory Marketing Techniques in the Beverage Industry, with a Comparative Focus on the Middle Eastern and Asia Pacific Market Regions

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Starbucks philosophy deals with satisfying customers not only in the realm of taste, but also olfactory, visual, tactile, and auditory sense. Starbucks has been consistently making an effort to create a sound, font, perfume and taste that appeals to customers. Background music at Starbucks stores are selected and released from Hearmusic, from the main office of Starbucks. Hearmusic provides 2 to 3 compact discs per month that include 100 songs to approximately 9000 of their shops worldwide. Due to this, consumers are able to offer coffee at a refreshing and comfortable environment. Regardless of countries or cultures, customers all around the world are able to share with each other their similar experiences at Starbucks.

Coca cola had another campaign in Australia known as Project Connect that was based on the brands ambition to strengthen its bond with Australia’s young adults and inspire moments of happiness in the customer’s real life. This campaign was more commonly known as share a coke. It started off by printing 150 of Australia’s most popular names on their bottles and cans. Word about this spread like wildfire and the huge reaction to this campaign allowed peoples votes to add 50 more names to this list. Soon after, kiosks were set up that allowed consumers to swap out the coke branding on bottles and cans with their own names. This marketing strategy skyrocketed the brand into unimaginable proportions. That very summer, coke recorded sale of more than 250 million named cans and bottles in a nation that consisted of less than 23 million people. Thus we see how a customer’s emotions affect his buying decision here where the idea that it would be cool to have your name or a friend’s name printed on a bottle that you are drinking from worked so well that in just 3 months it increased the brands sale by a huge chunk of 7%.

PESTEL ANALYSIS OF UAE

Political Factors

- The 7 nations that comprise of the UAE have their individual government establishments which allows for manoeuvrable room across the region.

- Though it is a peaceful domestic nation, UAE is prone to conflicts with multiple of its neighbours. These conflicts originate primarily regarding the ownership of oil and its reserves.

- The Emirates besides having political instability among its neighbours, has strong trade partners across the globe owing to a primarily migrant society and industrial globalization.

Economic Factors

- The Emirates have a high GDP per capita, with an extremely high purchasing power parity.

- With a young population, the Emirates has much to boast about in terms of its low employment rate.

- The Emirates has one of the highest amounts of Foreign Direct Investment in the region.

Social Factors

- The population of the region typically live comfortable lifestyles thanks to their well-paying jobs and high currency power.

- Globalization has resulted in a mix of different cultures within the region.

- Religion plays a key part in the society of the Emirates with a low cultural sensitization towards the western world.

Technological Factors

- A tech savvy young population allows globalized organizations towards leveraging technology towards marketing.

- Owing to its financial strength, UAE has been able to be in the vanguard of the technological forefront.

Environmental Factors

- UAE faces hot and dry climate perpetually, owing to which many industries might nt find it a feasible place to operate from.

- Its coastal port location aids its trade significance.

LITERATURE REVIEW

ACADEMIC

According to Aradhna Krishna in her book Customer Sense (an American academic focused on marketing. She is considered one of the 50 most productive marketing professors in the world, with Harvard Business Review recently acknowledging her as the foremost expert in the field of Sensory Marketing) – “Marketing that engages the consumers' senses and affects their perception, judgment and behaviour is defined as Sensory Marketing.” She suggests that "sensory marketing can be used to create subconscious triggers that characterize consumer perceptions of abstract notions of the product (e.g., its sophistication or quality)." She claims that “In the past, communications with customers were essentially monologues—companies just talked at consumers. Then they evolved into dialogues, with customers providing feedback. Now they’re becoming multidimensional conversations, with products finding their own voices and consumers responding viscerally and subconsciously to them.”

For over the past few decades, manufacturers and marketers have been inculcating expertise in holding out to customers in enticing multiple of their senses, such as the sense of sophistication associated with owning a Louis Vuitton clutch, the aroma of a Hallmark greeting Card or the quintessential roar of a Harley Davidson motorcycle.

As suggested by an article published in the Harvard Business Review (2015 Issue) - Research suggests that we’re about to enter an era in which many more consumer products companies will take advantage of sense-based marketing. The future of this research is pivoted around the concept of “embodied cognition". The concept hereon is based on the idea that the subconscious mind of the consumer has a majority stake in the decision making process towards consumption and purchase of goods beyond the actual conscious realization of the same to the consumer.

According to Krishna, in her paper - An integrative review of sensory marketing (2011), sensation and perception are stages of processing of the senses. Sensation is when the stimulus impinges upon the receptor cells of a sensory organ—it is biochemical (and neurological) in nature. Perception is the awareness or understanding of sensory information. She outlines a conceptual framework for the same incorporating the differentiator between sensation, perception, cognition and emotion.[pic 8]

A marketing dissertation published in Högskolan i Halmstad in May 2008 by Cyril Valenti and Joseph Riviere, sensory marketing