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A conceptual framework for the assessment of brand congruent sensory modalities

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Abstract

Companies wishing to engage in multisensory marketing by adding previously unused sensory modalities to their brands need to ask how their brand identity translates into these unoccupied modalities. Identifying brand identity congruent sensory modalities in a unisensory fashion is not helpful as multisensory interaction effects change their meaning. Furthermore, existing sensory evaluation techniques do not meet the requirements of marketing managers to serve this purpose. This article addresses this gap by first analysing a multisensory marketing strategy of adding previously unused sensory modalities to an existing brand. Theory supports this strategy, because it enhances the recognition, evaluation and memory of the brand and lets the brand profit from multisensory enhancement. Paramount for this strategy to work is to guarantee the congruency between the newly added sensory modalities with the existing ones of the brand and the brand personality. Therefore, as a second goal, this article proposes a conceptual framework to assess the congruency of sensory modalities in a multisensory semantic context. A three-step process is presented that draws on evaluation techniques used to assess congruency in psychology and the sensory evaluation of food.

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Notes

  1. In selecting the described keywords, the following assumptions were taken: (i) sensory congruency will be discussed in a domain focusing on the interaction of a multitude of senses, that is, multisensory marketing; (ii) ‘Multisensory’ and ‘multi-sensory’ are two general keywords more capable of capturing papers on sensory congruency rather than using very focused keywords like ‘cross-modal research’, which could leave out papers investigating sensory congruency using other keywords.

  2. The selection of marketing journals was determined by their ranking according to SCImago (SCImago Journal and Country Rank, 2014) as well as their focus of research, rendering them relevant for the question at hand.

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Appendix

Appendix

Critical literature review (CLR)

On 23 April 2014, a CLR was conducted to assess the growing body on multisensory marketing with regards to congruency. The CLR focuses on the methods used in assessing congruency.

Key words and timeframe

The CLR follows a funnel like process by starting out broad and narrowing down the focus in later steps in the analysis. Therefore, very general keywords like ‘multisensory’ or ‘multi-sensory’ and ‘marketing’ were used as a first step.Footnote 1 The timeframe was not limited, thus ensuring to also capture the earliest studies on the topic. Finally, the keywords were searched for in the whole journal.

Sources

The only limitation in the CLR was applied to the number of sources used to restrict the results to a manageable amount. Thus, the search was limited to peer-reviewed journals to ensure a high quality of research. The designated journals are highly ranked publications in the field of marketingFootnote 2 (Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Psychology), as well as two other journals with a major focus on multisensory evaluation, as highlighted by Lawless and Heymann (1998) (journal of sensory studies and food quality and preference).

Procedure

The CLR started out broad and narrowed down in subsequent steps. The initial search produced a longlist of 114 articles. In a subsequent step, articles were manually filtered out that did not directly contribute to the research question of measuring congruency. This was done by scanning the abstracts and titles of the remaining papers. The excluded papers were primarily journal announcements, book reviews and studies that did not explicitly investigate the interrelation of at least two sensory modalities. During this first screening, one new key word arose that seemed closely linked to the topic: ‘synaesthetic’. An additional search using this key-word however did not produce any additional papers that appeared relevant for further analysis. The final selection of papers was analysed regarding their research question, results and research method, as shown in Table 2. Only papers remained investigating the interrelation between at least two different senses using multivariate statistical techniques.

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Stach, J. A conceptual framework for the assessment of brand congruent sensory modalities. J Brand Manag 22, 673–694 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/bm.2015.35

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