Is your brand appealing to senses?

In a shopping mall there is always the foodcourt. The one I have been last week here in Hong Kong had about 8 restaurants, not so big. But the curious thing about this foodcourt, was a big queue for a single restaurant when the others were almost empty in terms of queue for order. Not surprisingly it capture my attention.

This restaurant was ‘Pepper Lunch‘, Japanese owned, “it delivers a sizzling meal served on a special iron hot plate. Using a special electromagnetic cooker patented in Japan, the iron plate will heat up to 260C in 70 seconds and remain hot (…) The plate keeps food warm for a longer time and customers can enjoy the full flavor of the dish.”

They have 2 TV screens on each side of the restaurant showing a close-up of the dish being actually cooked and demonstrating how to cook. I even though it was a live camera recording the actual order being cooked, it wasn’t, but neither the ways, it is an original way of revealing trust inside out and educating people within their concept of DIY. Then, this restaurant is all about grilled and sizzling food, so in fact, customers take their orders out with the loud ‘grilled and sizzling food sound’ in order to continue cooking it at their preference, and to complement, this sound gets out also on the TV speakers.

All these brand touchpoints which you can notice on their website, make an integrated brand communication approach, where as Martin Lindstrom defends, brands should appeal to all the senses and recognize the power of communicating through the senses. Together with an original concept, “Pepper Lunch” is a smart approach which results in a sizable expansion within the Asia Pacific region. Is your brand appealing to senses?

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Benchmarking TV Series

Television Series are focused. When we see successful television series, communication is solid and characters traits can be spotted easily.  Character A, B and C represent different personalities and interact with each other in similar ways along different episodes. Storyline is focused on exactly a line of though and interactions, changing according with episodes situations but within each personality circle. Same music, same introduction, same logo.

For example, Dr.House series is always about a problem which doesn’t seem related with a obvious medical answer, then in order to solve that problem creative ways have to pop up during time to time. Meanwhile, each character puxes its behavior – the main character along with its medical team of 3, colleague and supervisor.

Creators know how to position television series, and a complete branding structure is always solidly implemented. Sometimes even during 9 years such as Seinfeld without major changes – only script and the experience in each episode. Companies should benchmark these practices. Planning solid implementations of their brands and continuously delivering a whole script of interactions based on the core brand values. They should clearly introduce their brand personality according with their strategy and target market, presenting a whole experience and interaction with their ‘tribes’, delivering entertainment, excitement and linking emotions, just like television series creatively do.

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Interact!

Every other week we can see interesting campaigns at the MTR (subway) in Hong Kong. Most are unoticed (80%), some are interesting and catch a glance of people’s attention (15%) and only a very few can make a remark worth to talk about (5%).

Hong Kong as you might know is one of the places in the World where advertising clutter is huge. The search for new ways to interact here are in much higher demand say than a place were few billboards are present, but still, average companies continue to do average things.

Some are exception. Standard Chartered Bank with TBWA Tequila Hong Kong, presented an amazingly effective campaign, the Click-a-Count.  Up the escalators they putted ad screens along the way. Each ad screen was surronded by solid design based on Standard’s colours. The best thing was three different videos displaying on subsequent different screens, each presented a simple and effective message - like an automated movement with flipping coins, fingers clicking and ATM’s, all resembling actions for their core message of easy transactions. Furthermore, they sounded like clicks, cash, coins.

Result: 90% of the people going up on escalators was staring at the ad. Embarked on the experience the brand was giving to them. Senses were touched by the sound of clicks and flipping coins, along with the effective automated movement created by the videos. The rest goes into the marketing team to analyze its ROI and future brand management.

What’s important here is that people want entertainment and they search for new ways of interaction. The future reserves us a complete new dimension of interaction in just a few years from now, but still, most companies are stuck in traditional ways, not fully using existing technology which is definitely effective and putting breaks on their creative teams to indeed break rules.

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