Fragrance, Flavour & Synaesthesia
Sensations® is a vital QualiQuant® tool we created, which we are very proud of, having won the ESOMAR Congress Award for Best Case History for ‘How Does Your Cappuccino Feel?’ in 2013, through our extensive collaboration with Mane. The Sensations® tool allows us to discover unconscious feelings about fragrance and flavour that are not accessible by other modes of research. This provides us with unique and invaluable insight into consumers’ feelings and helps us help technicians to engineer fragrances and flavours that truly meet consumer and brand needs.
Our Sensations® methodology uses the principles of the psychology of Synaesthesia to overcome the problems presented by traditional flavour testing techniques; limited vocabulary of consumers in terms of describing flavour and fragrance and limited methods of flavour testing (i.e. hedonic questions and verbal rating scales which lack sensitivity and make it hard to discriminate between one flavour and another).
We are able to develop a rich, emotionally based, description of flavours and fragrances and to create a visual and verbal language that our clients can use to help engineer brand positioning using our Sensations® methodology.
For example, we can look at how flavour and fragrance are experienced in terms of the other senses, i.e. sight in terms of colours associated with it, touch in terms of material associations, smell in terms of odour associations, hearing in terms of musical mood associations, etc.
Knowing how people experience and associate flavours and fragrances in relation to their other senses allows us to build a projective world around each flavour or fragrance tested. Synaesthesia is thought to be the basis of long-term memory, imagination, emotion, and language, which leads to improved brand relationships through better sensory and emotional engagement with consumers resulting in stronger brands and higher brand shares.
Our Sensations® Tool has allowed us to dig far beneath the surface of consumers’ perceptions, bringing to light extraordinary insights into emotional responses to flavour and fragrance.
Read the paper here!
The QRi Team x
Body Art Branding
How far are you willing to go to show your dedication to a brand?
Some people have decided to show their dedication by getting their favourite brand’s logo tattooed onto their body.
It was not long ago that tattoos at work were considered taboo especially from an 
employer’s perspective, and some might still be opposed to ink peeking over an employees’ collar or out of a cuff. But, recently a phenomenon has arisen in which people – employees and customers – are tattooing the logos and slogans of the companies they work for or the brands they love!
The BBC has reported that the phenomenon started when a company manager of Anytime Fitness got a company tattoo on a dare, but was quickly followed by more than 2,000 people around the world who now have the company’s logo tattooed on their body. Now the company encourages people to get tattoos of their logo and to tell them why they decided to get inked and in return the company will reimburse them.
One woman who lost 68kgs at Anytime Fitness got the tattoo because it gave ‘her life back’.
But does encouraging customers and employees to get inked strengthen your brand?
Some say yes! If people feel such as strong connection with your brand that they are willing to permanently mark their body with your logo they are extremely committed to it!
“It demonstrates a real emotional commitment to a brand, and shows how much brands have come into different aspects of our lives – they are no longer just about a product or experience”
– Rebecca Battman
Id this the ultimate Lovemark? Kevin Roberts of Saatchi & Saatchi, believes that what distinguishes brands is the love that consumers feel towards that brand and the products it produces. Consumers are more likely to use a brand they feel they have an emotional connection with, otherwise known as a Lovemark. If consumers show off their relationship with a brand though branding their own body, surely this will leave a lasting impression on other potential consumers of the brand and work as publicity. It will make others consider what is so special about the brand and leave them wanting to experience the same relationship.
The QRi Team x
Where is your company on the FutureBrand Index?
QRi Consulting has been working in close collaboration with FutureBrand, helping to define the research approach against FutureBrand’s initial hypothesis, that the ranking PwC’s top 100 global companies will be re-ordered when the balance between ‘wants’ and ‘needs’ (or ‘Experience’ and ‘Purpose’) is measured, regardless of their financial performance. QRi has been managing recruitment, questionnaire development, and providing in-depth analysis of the qualitative and quantitative data underpinning the report.
This work is informed by QRi’s extensive research, brand and sector knowledge and experience as well as our QualiQuant® methodologies.
Our ability to measure emotion, through evaluating companies on Purpose and Experience dimensions, has enabled us to define emotional perceptions and relationships that our global audience has with the top 100 market cap companies of the world. This approach is arguably a better predictor of future potential, showing that Future Brands have strong ratings on both Purpose and Experience.
