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5 Star Plus Storytelling Series: Senses

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Now that we have an understanding of the impact emotion and colors can have when it comes to storytelling, let’s examine the impact sensory storytelling can have on consumers. Incorporating sensory elements such as light, smell, and textures into retail design helps to enhance the brand story of a retailer while also effecting the customers’ thinking and ultimately their decision making.
Importance of Sensory Storytelling for Brands
The psychology behind storytelling is that the natural instinct of the human mind craves for meaning. Storytelling helps us to process information and remember it. Even though this is a benefit, it’s important to remember that a common fault of the mind is to forget some of the facts. When this happens, the mind will invent connections so that the information can still be processed by others. This innate human error is exactly why sensory storytelling becomes very important for brands. While engaging with stories, the sensory cortex in the brain is light up, allowing the listener to feel, hear, taste, and even smell the story.
Zara, one of the world’s leading fashion retailers and proud to be a high fashion, yet affordable Spanish brand. The story behind Zara’s success is that they are seen as a company with great style and fashion consciousness. To express that in their physical stores, Zara uses black and white on the walls, and to make them look even more elegant they utilize a very minimalistic design with monochromic fixtures and shelves. Another added detail to enhance their story are the characteristic spicy scent used in every store, and the relaxing yet trendy background music in order to create an upbeat environment.

When customers make decisions, they are based on impulses, gut feelings, or force of habit. Not every decision can be rational due to limited amount of time. Quite often it is a design element, like size or color that gives the final push to customers when it comes to choosing a product. Even tiny design decisions can influence customer’s choices at an unconscious level.
Abercrombie & Fitch is another good example to show how a brand can build up a certain personality and incorporate the different senses to their brand’s story. The image they want to show towards their customers is a “cool and good-looking teenager”. Their fragrance for men they use in the men section is a clean scent of citrus and warm dusk. They are also known for their loud music in the stores which makes them able to maintain a more youthful clientele. Apart from building up their brand image, the dimmed lights, loud and vibrant music also encourage impulse shopping.

Storytelling Design Tools
1. Rule of Three
The logic behind rule of three comes down to the way the mind processes information. Humans are very good at recognizing patterns and three is the smallest number of elements required to create a pattern. Consumers are not only able to build a pattern with three elements but are also able to break it. In this case the last item is something unexpected and breaks the pattern that was set by the first two. The aim is to surprise and satisfy at the same time.
The magical number can appear in various elements of the storytelling. It can be three facts about the brand, three mannequins grouped together, three words as a catchy slogan or three different product lines placed next to each other.
Steve Jobs applied the rule or three in almost every presentation he held about Apple. When announcing the first iPhone in 2007, he built his whole presentation around it. He claimed Apple would introduce three revolutionary products: a new iPod, a phone, and an internet communication device. He repeated each of them slowly until the audience figured out he was talking about one device, the iPhone, which was the third revolutionary product category after Macintosh and iPod.

2. Gaze
For designers it’s essential to understand how the target consumer’s vision works. What makes them look at certain things longer, what determines the order in which they look at objects? Can this wandering, searching movement of the vision be influenced? Without a deeper knowledge of this activity, designers won’t be able to create an impactful retail design to successfully tell the brand’s story. Colors, borders, words, pictures and shapes like arrows are used in order to control vision and to attract the gaze of users. Certain graphic elements can captivate the eye while others help the vision to wander along a path. This constant search for change moves the gaze from one point to another, constantly changing the focus.

 

3. Guide through Your Story
The Swedish brand, IKEA doesn’t only sell furniture to their customers, they also tell them a story which is about ‘loving where we live’. The key brand goal is to make their customers feel understood. IKEA showrooms are like labyrinths which means they are designed in a way to carry along customers on a controlled journey. The customer journey through the store brings guests through different room examples to show how their homes can look like, how it would smell and how it would feel living there. Guests can try out every piece of furniture, sleep in the beds, and relax on the sofas. The unique design of different showrooms allow guests to their senses of sight, touch, to envision what IKEA products could look like in their own home.

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What Comes Next
The right brand story has the power to increase the value of your business’s product or service. After accessing their brand identity, brick and mortar stores have a huge advantage over their online competitors by communicating across five senses. The key is to trigger an emotional response by building up a multi-sensory in-store experience.

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