VR Vs. Other Multi-Sensory Experiences

Last month, Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook’s plans for huge investment into virtual reality, building on the $2 billion he’d already spent acquiring VR system maker, Oculus Rift, in 2014. With Google, Apple and Microsoft also heavily invested in this space, it seems reasonable to expect for VR to make the transition from a Silicon Valley lab to a Lea Valley living room pretty soon.

It’s a safe bet that Facebook made this investment expecting VR to become a major new platform for brand marketing. And marketing industry pundits seem to agree, if media coverage is anything to go by as virtual reality is continually mentioned across the press.

It's not for me to question the combined wisdom of Silicon Valley billionaires and industry gurus, but in all the excitement surrounding the marketing potential of this emerging tech platform, I'm suggesting that perhaps we're overlooking the opportunities offered by an age old, fool proof platform that’s been around a lot longer: the five-million-year-old human sensory system?

Surprising as it may seem, scientists are still making fresh discoveries into how human perception is created from our senses. Far from being a closed subject, sensory perception is a thriving area of study that regularly throws out new insights with practical applications for brand marketing.

That’s why Naked recently hosted an event in London, with invited expert Professor Charles Spence from Oxford University’s Crossmodal Research Lab. While we’ve known for years that perception is a mental rather than a physical experience – we smell with our brains, not our noses – our senses don’t operate independently. Spence highlighted the importance of combining senses in complementary ways to deepen the consumer's emotional connection which could lead to superadditivity.

Take bodyspray brand, Lynx, which has designed a spray mechanism to make just the right ‘pssst’ sound because, together with the spray sensation, this actually makes the product feel more effective. And curiously, ice cream served on a white plate tastes sweeter than ice cream eaten off a black plate. Simple discoveries like these enable brands to create distinctive and memorable experiences that increase a consumer's brand preference.

It’s precisely because we’re still learning about new and unexpectedly powerful ways of combining sensory stimulus that brands shouldn’t automatically reach for the latest technology when looking for innovative ways to communicate with consumers. Multi-sensory marketing in the real world has several advantages over virtual storytelling.

For one thing, VR is essentially a solitary experience – one person in a headset, immersed in a simulated world, oblivious to the real world outside. But we know that brand power comes from the shared meanings they represent within social groups. Strong brands create social norms which are strong drivers for purchase. Multi-sensory experiences, although at one level unique to each individual, can easily be delivered in social settings (pubs, shopping centres and town squares etc) to help establish commonly-understood brand values. VR experiences will have to work harder to recreate this social element.

VR delivers a compelling experience, but it's limited to sight and sound.  Yet the so-called chemical senses – smell and taste – are known to be more evocative, triggering memories or moods far more quickly, short-cutting the rational mind and accessing emotions directly. That’s one advantage of multi-sensory experiences over VR: they allow brands to connect emotionally by triggering multiple emotional connections in the consumer’s mind.

Furthermore VR is very technology-dependent. There’s the cost issue (can people afford the headset?), a connectivity issue (is the consumer in a place with a good enough data connection?) and, of course, the physical encumbrance of needing to wear the headset. By contrast, multi-sensory experiences can be created in decidedly low tech, low cost ways – from scent strips to textured packaging.

Having said all that, virtual reality is itself a sensory experience. Its power in creating a convincing illusion is testament to the power of combining senses – in this case, sight and sound. The phenomenon of VR is just one more example of how human perception is a strange and wonderful thing – every second of every day our brains conjure up a convincing experience of our being firmly-placed in the physical world, yet this experience is largely due to an imaginary fiction and open to technological and psychological influences.

So, before spending big money to create experiences in the virtual world, brands should ask themselves: have I made full use of all the other five senses in the real world?