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The consumer world is full of products designed to attract us and appeal to our different senses. We are surrounded by a plethora of different sights, smells, tastes, textures…
But how do you design & create a compelling consumer product that will stand out from the crowd?
“Multisensory consumer experiences” was the topic of the FMCG Open Innovation Forum last week where we explored the science of our senses and understood more about how consumers make decisions.
Kicking this off in a really fun and interactive way was a multi-sensory dinner curated by Caroline Hobkinson from http://www.stirringwithknives.com/. Have you ever tried eating a cinnamon flavoured fritter with a peg on your nose? Or tried eating sorbet using a range of spoons of different textures and weights? The fritter tastes really bland as you only actually experience cinnamon through smell, and the taste of the sorbet varies in sweetness according to the type of spoon!
Most bizarre of all was when we were asked to inject a piece of salmon sashimi with a syringe full of whiskey … the tastes & smells combine together so you think you’re eating smoked salmon!
Other sessions during the forum included discussions on neuro science looking at consumer’s non-conscious response to brands & products.
The forum continued with breakout groups discussing how to create multisensory food & beverage products and how the members of the FMCG supply chain could work together to make this happen.
It’s clear that understanding the science behind the product is key to creating a truly innovative experience all the way from the ingredients, the preparation to the delivery method.
At Cambridge Consultants we take a “science led innovation” approach to many of our projects to develop multisensory consumer experiences. We take the time to explore, through lab work and desk based research, the scientific principles behind a particular effect or consumer experience and then we feed this understanding into the concept generation and development. This means we create really robust and radical products. For example, we explored how to create uniform bubbles and how to deliver a perfect pint every time. Similarly we’ve worked on on-bar frozen cocktail dispensers for Diageo where understanding the thermodynamics of the system was key to being able to deliver consistent drink quality in a high throughput system.
