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This article presents two studies that investigate whether or not sensory appeal preferences in advertisements affect brand attitude. Study 1 seeks to discover empirically whether self-referencing and positive affect mediate sensory appeals to influence consumers' attitudes toward a brand, and whether such mediation effects differ across various ad formats. Study 2, a case approach, attempts to derive core sensory concepts through qualitative techniques as applied to an established specialty coffee brand. The results indicate that self-referencing and positive affect both have significant mediating effects between sensory appeal preferences and attitudes toward a coffee brand. Moreover, the finding that sensory preferences enhance ad effectiveness using particular delivery platforms sheds important insights on creative strategies for sensory ads. As a result of qualitative techniques that elicited metaphoric images regarding the specialty coffee brand, this research found that sight was the most influential sense. In the end, this paper discusses the implications concerning synaesthetic assumptions made and tested in this research as well as the broader applicability of the sensory approach to advertising effectiveness.

Human senses are an incredible information collection system. Through them, we create and recreate images of ambient situations and, based on that information, intuitively and instantaneously process sensory information to make imminent decisions. Recently emerging behavioral economists have begun addressing this need for “sensory marketing,” which emphasizes the sensory impressions that usually accompany optimal emotional responses to cause changes in purchasing behavior. Traditional information processing in consumer behavior theories encompasses a broad range of stages. Consumers review and evaluate each piece of information (i.e. company, product, store, ads, etc.) through the stages of exposure, attention, and comprehension, arriving at a final judgment: purchase intention. A stimulus is detected in sensory registers and transmitted to short-term memory, where it is attended to and comprehended through the process of encoding, storage, and retrieval from long-term memory. In this perspective, it is important not only to understand the role of senses in information processing but also to develop new consumer decision-making models based on the senses by critically reexamining the cognition- or emotion-based models. In traditional consumer decision-making processes, reasonable decisions and inferences are made based on the process of learn-feel-act. However, a new sensory branding model based on intuitive and unconscious information processing proposes that consumers sense first, then feel or think, and act last. The understanding of how our senses work is especially important in branding. Making a sensory, emotional, and rational connection with consumers can stimulate their senses and appeal to them, thereby rendering marketing plans far more effective (Hill, 2003). The link between sensory appeals and brand effectiveness has been demonstrated by the studies of Lindstrom (2005), who argued that each brand must incorporate sensory appeals specific to its product features. Lindstrom's pioneering research proposes a multisensory branding strategy that encompasses a consumer sensory experience. According to the results of focus group studies in thirteen countries and research on brand sense in global markets, each brand has a sensory profile related to at least one distinct and positive sensory characteristic. Some brands have several sensory characteristics simultaneously. For instance, Coca-Cola appeals to various senses through sight (its curvy bottle), touch (the feel of its cool package), hearing (the sound created when pouring), and taste (its invigorating flavor). Lindstrom (2005) also suggests that consumer brand loyalty results from sensory perceptions of superior brand experience, leadership, and clarity. In a study of nine different brands, sight had a significant relationship with brand leadership and clarity and played a supplementary role in the other functions. Taste, touch, and smell all enhanced brand loyalty through superior brand experience. In addition, all five senses have different levels of impact on loyalty, with taste exerting the greatest influence, followed by smell, sound, touch, and sight. The more sensory stimuli provided by a product, the greater the product's perceived value. Therefore, developing a branding strategy based on sensory experience has important implications in a consumer market characterized by individuals' emotions and experiences. In light of these findings, the research presented here explores the mechanism in which sensory appeal affects brand attitude by employing both qualitative and quantitative methods to develop a sensory branding model. To date, research suggests that self-referencing influences positive effect, which improves ad attitude (Chang, 2005), or affects mental simulation, which eventually enhances brand attitude (Escalas, 2004). Comparatively little research, however, explores the mediating effects of self-referencing on sensory preferences, viewing self-reference as a collateral construct to positive affect with consequent influences on evaluative judgments and attitudes toward brands. Rather, researchers have investigated positive affect as merely an antecedent or emotional linking pin to brand equity without concomitant consideration of the role of self-referencing (Gurhan-Canlil and Ahluwalia, 1999 and Kamp and Macinnis, 1995). Thus, our understanding of the roles of self-referencing and positive affect as dually conjoint mediators between sensory preference and brand attitude remains somewhat limited. Another relatively poorly researched area of sensory effects in branding is that concerning the role of multisensory appeals of an ad's creative elements and the impact they may have on attitudes toward the brand. The literature discusses synaesthetics as a term to explain the synthetic mechanism of multi-senses ( Cooper and Braithwaite, 2002 and Lindstrom, 2005), but empirical applications of the concept in advertising studies are difficult to find. Yet another potentially important area warranting further investigation in connection with the sensory effects of ads is “creativity in advertising,” which would strengthen both methodological and theoretical aspects of introducing creative approaches to ad effectiveness ( O'Quin and Besemer, 1989 and Heiser et al., 2008). The research here consists of two parts. Study 1 proposes that consumers have a predisposed preference toward sensory clues featured in coffee ads that creates self-referencing when the sensory appeals are perceived as congruent with one's image. A consumer emotionally identifying with sensory stimuli elicits a positive affective response. The self-referencing and positive affect boost brand attitude. The study investigates whether self-referencing and positive affect in ads play a role in mediating between sensory preference and brand attitude. Further, it empirically tests for any difference in mediating effects depending on type of ad (copy or visual). Added to this objective is an exploration of the effects of multisensory appeals on brand attitude, with special attention to the presence of synaesthetic functionality among those appeals. Study 2 presents a case approach to sensory perceptions of an established specialty coffee brand (The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf) by qualitatively eliciting the core sensory concepts through image-based techniques such as ZMET (Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique, developed by Zaltman and Coulter, 1995). Specifically, the research aims to elicit metaphysical thoughts and concepts by translating sensory appeals into images and metaphors. Translating sensory images into mental concepts has been attempted in previous studies as an auxiliary means of confirming concepts susceptible to imagery (Creswell, 1998 and Weiss, 1992). However, the application of such imagery-based techniques has confined itself mostly to deriving consumers' mental concepts of certain objects or events (Creswell, 1998 and Zaltman and Coulter, 1995), with very few studies attempting to derive marketing implications. Study 2 strives to bridge this gap by attempting to extract core sensory concepts associated with a specific coffee brand to find strategic or practical implications for sensory branding. Methodologically, this research examines how coffee-related sensory preferences influence brand attitude through the use of pictures or images associated with the specific brand. In sum, the results of these two studies may contribute to deepening our understanding of how sensory stimuli bring up resident memory, either experiential or imaginary, through self-referencing and positive affect. Moreover, based on a case approach, it may extract core sensory concepts by means of metaphoric images represented in semantic schema, which has rich implications for a creative strategy applicable to product-specific or brand-specific communications.

Based on the sensory information processing theory, this research set out to investigate the effects of sensory preferences on attitudes toward a coffee brand with the aim of corroborating the mediating effects of self-referencing and positive affect. Another important objective here was to verify the role of sensory appeals' metaphoric images in forming brand attitude by means of eliciting sensory concepts on a coffee brand based on qualitative methods. The research found the following. First, in the case of coffee advertising, self-referencing and positive affect are significant mediators between the sensory clue preference and brand attitude. Especially noteworthy is that the ad with only a visual element showed much more mediating effect than ads with copy only or copy and visual together. The discovery that sensory preference helps maximize ad effectiveness by adopting particular delivery platforms sheds important insights on formulating creative strategies for sensory ads. In addition, the finding that sensory appeals had disparate effects on brand attitude as opposed to ad attitude may invoke useful strategic thinking because it indicates the need to use sensory appeals differently depending on the goals of advertising or brand effectiveness. In Study 2, which took a qualitative approach, the “Coffee Bean” brand elicited core sensory concepts based on metaphoric imagery analysis using ZMET. The sensory appeals that most affected attitude toward the brand were, in terms of importance, visual, palate-related, olfactory, auditory, and tactile, reconfirming the importance of the visual element in eliciting the brand attitude. Another significant finding was that “sweetness” is a common trait (concept) that links olfactory and palate-related senses together. This result reveals some new aspects of synaesthetic conceptual traits associated with the Coffee Bean brand, which suggests the usefulness of taking a qualitative approach based on a metaphor-eliciting method. In line with the importance of synaesthetics that the literature reports, this research supports the presence of synaesthetic traits in sensory image-based metaphors about a coffee brand. This revelation suggests the need for advertisers to understand which sensory stimuli blend together to create maximum synergistic effects on brand attitude. Understanding this synergistic mechanism may be particularly useful in formulating copy or visual tactics designed to enhance advertising effectiveness and may, depending on the magnitude of the synergistic effects, boost brand equity. Future studies can benefit from using more than one brand to enable direct comparisons among different brands of the same product categories. A better but more comprehensive approach would be to employ more than one product category to compare the effects of sensory appeals on brand and ad attitudes. The result of such an approach would help researchers formulate product-specific sensory branding strategies, which would broaden our knowledge of product-based sensory branding. One more reason for the need to add different product categories is the fact that coffee as a product holding a dominant association with one sense (i.e., olfactory) may cause some spill-over effect that could undermine research subjects' ability to combine and synthesize other less salient sensory appeals designed to create a sensory-based overall impression. As a way to address this concern, future researchers are advised to consider other product categories that elicit more than one dominant sense. Finally, the hybrid use of quantitative-qualitative techniques proved its worth for complementary utility. Especially worthwhile is the hybrid approach's ability to generate in-depth interpretations of the phenomenon in question. As this research intended to combine a case approach with experimental study using sensory appeals as a base for comparing different aspects of their effects, the result is limited in generalizing beyond the brand used for the case approach. Therefore, future studies may benefit by converging the research focus on the same aspects of sensory effects using different brands. In addition, more studies need to be done to attempt qualitative techniques enabling deeper interpretations. For instance, laddering techniques such as means-end chain models or thematic apperception tests are recommended. This would allow participants to talk about the images or illustrations presented so that researchers could make an inference on the hierarchically motivated or subliminal perceptions of the sensory appeals.