Making more sense of brand experiences
A recent post on Making Sense of Brand Design (link here) shares some great examples of creating sensory signatures to create short term impact and long term brand identity, and recent reading (see references) has revealed more ways in which the senses can be leveraged to create great brand experiences.
The most interesting overall finding revealed in Helmut Leder’s Scientific American article is that in the short term how a product or experience looks is very important to its appeal, but after a month of use how it feels comes to be much more important than how it looks. It’s great to wear a really fancy pair of shoes for the first time, but we won’t wear them very often unless they are really comfortable on our feet. Read more »
“Mathematics is he universal language of the mind, music is the language of the heart.” - Robert Schumann
A worm in your ear
Last week I spent some time shopping in Jakarta, to understand the competitive environment and category messaging for a brand I am working on. As I wandered through a (relatively modern) supermarket in Jakarta, I noticed my irritation at the shop’s jingle which kept repeating, repeating and repeating as I walked through the aisles. The jingle was short, felt quite childish, but irritatingly catchy (it’s still ringing through my head now – I can’t seem to forget it as much as I would like to). Read more »
How smart are our eyes?
In his Theory of Colours, published just over 200 years ago, Goethe describes colour as having ‘a strange duplicity’ and wrote about colour as something other than constant and fixed. Although his theory has been superseded, his ideas on colour perception as a product of the interplay of light and dark are still relevant today. Goethe is also partly responsible for the colour circle that is standard now and the idea of complementary colours. Read more »
The Incredulity of Saint Thomas by Caravaggio
“The hands want to see, the eyes want to caress.” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“The task of architecture is to make visible how the world touches us” - Juhani Pallasmaa paraphrasing Merleau-Ponty
Are we seeing too much?
In The Eyes of the Skin, Juhani Pallasmaa argues for the importance of our sense of touch and the dangerous dominance of vision in our thinking, design and buildings. Vision was the last of the senses to develop in evolutionary terms, but has become our dominant sense accounting for around two-thirds or more of sensory processing (you can read more on vision here and more on touch here). Like all the other senses, our sight is embedded in our skin and is an adaptation of it. Vision originated as light sensitive skin cells, and our eyes still have a covering of skin. Our skin is still sensitive to light and experiments have shown that some people are even able to detect colour from their skin’s sensitivity alone (that is, they can see with their skin!). Read more »
“When I see equations, I see the letters in colors – I don’t know why. As I’m talking, I see vague pictures of Bessel functions, with light-tan j’s, slightly violet-bluish n’s, and dark brown x’s flying around. And I wonder what the hell it must look like to the students.” - Richard Feynman Read more »
“Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.” - Jonathan Swift
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“The reason why we have two ears and only one mouth is that we may listen more and talk less.” - Zeno Read more »
“I have only one superstition. I touch all the bases when I hit a home run.” - Babe Ruth
Touch is the world
I remember vividly one occasion in my childhood in Devon during an electric storm when a sudden powercut meant that I had to find my way around our home, to fetch some candles. It was very scary (particularly as we had been watching Alien on TV when the powercut happened). It was also exhilarating, as I found that using my hands I could see my way around the house (along with the mental map in my head). That was until I stepped into the kitchen (which was on a lower level) and screamed when I put my foot in the cold water which was the result of flooding!
Touch is in many ways different from other senses as it is “us”. Eyes, ears, tongue and nose are all specific organs with specific functions, but touch encompasses our whole body. More importantly, touch is the way that we “know” what’s out there – although we can see our environment, it doesn’t become “real” until we touch it or hold it. Read more »
“Sour, sweet, bitter, pungent, all must be tasted.” - Chinese proverb
Famous four or five?
Surely there was more to my richly flavoured bowl of noodles last night than the four basic tastes which most of us recognise? There was a rich savoury sensation on my tongue which I find difficult to describe, although it’s well understood in Asia.
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“Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousands of miles and all the years you have lived.” - Helen Keller
What is your favourite smell? I have many: the smoky, velvet, roasted smell of freshly brewed coffee (I have a pot in front of me), the fragrant hops at Brakspears’ brewery at Henley (no longer existing), and the sharp earthy smell of freshly cut grass are three that often come to my mind when thinking about smells that I love. One smell I really cannot bring myself to love is the durian, although many of my friends swear by it.
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