Commentary

How to use scents and touch to improve your digital signage

Smell and touch can help improve the effectiveness of your digital signage by tapping into customer's emotions and memories.

November 15, 2018 by Ellyce Kelly — Communications Consultant/Public Relations Special, Visix, Inc.

This is part two of a three part series analyzing the senses and digital signage. This part covers smell and touch. Click here for part 1, covering sight and sound.

Olfactory

Smell conveys around 3 or 4-percent of information. And we know from psychological studies that smell is deeply connected with memory. There are even a few scientists who postulate that smell was our first primary sense, and that the brain grew larger in order to extend smell’s capabilities (until sight and hearing eclipsed it).

Scent marketing is on the rise, especially in the food industry and in public spaces like shopping centers. In terms of organizational communications, smell, like audio, needs to be used rarely and judiciously. All the caveats about sound apply doubly to smell. Simple, non-complex scents used once in a while might have a positive impact on your audience, but too much too frequently is almost certainly going to confuse them at best and annoy them at worst. Smell should never be distracting or overwhelming, and you want to give any previous scents time to disperse before introducing a new one into an environment.

Modern technology makes introducing scents into spaces fairly simple these days, and recent studies show that smell can be very effective for stimulating desire and encoding brand awareness. There are even small devices that allow scents to be messaged to people using their smartphones from companies like oPhone, and scent diffusers with AI-like interfaces from companies like Scentee and the ONotes Cyrano. 

There's also the rather well-known case of promoting the MIXC shopping center in the Shanghai subway system. Global advertiser JCDecaux created a complex display of flat-screen cubes with images on all sides that you could walk around (and huge QR codes to take people to dedicated webpages). Each side incorporated scents that complimented the images on the screens. For example, one screen showed images of the ocean, and also had ocean sounds and a tangy salt water scent. Other multi-sensory displays featured flowers and a forest.

This is a way to extend the entire concept of interactivity – creating an entire mini-environment that, for just a few moments, takes people out of the ordinary world and transports them somewhere else. This is sure to be a memorable experience, which reinforces your brand immeasurably.

When used correctly, scent can be a powerful brand enhancer, especially when combined with visual and auditory cues. Imagine a message on a digital signage for a car — there's a picture, video clip or cinemagraph of the car, a quick sound clip of the car door opening or closing, and then a quick puff of the scent of leather or the famous "new car smell." All these together, in the right environment, would almost certainly make many people stop for a moment and pay attention.

There have been numerous studies conducted about scents, and some of the smells people like best are:

• fresh baked bread
• bacon
• freshly cut grass
• coffee
• the sea
• fresh laundry
• flowers
• Christmas trees
• vanilla
• wood fires
• lemon
• babies’ heads
• chocolate
• vanilla
• old books

No doubt just when reading that list, you had some nice memories pop into your head. Try and imagine the impact actually smelling them in concert with a digital signage visual would have.

Tactile

Touch accounts for 1-2 percent of the information we receive from the world around us, but again the emotional impact is far greater than that. Touch is already incorporated into smartphones and tablets with haptic responses – slight vibration when a finger touches the screen. People who use haptics on interactive screens are more accurate with where they touch, and feel like they are accomplishing something more than if they just feel smooth glass under their fingers.

Obviously, interactive touchscreen digital signage is already a tactile medium, and is just crying out for haptics. Each time a person touches the screen, they are "rewarded" with a tactile sensation. It gives them a sense of achievement, and verifies their choice for them instantly.

The University of British Columbia finds that touchscreens encourage more impulsive decision-making in retail environments, and people spend more time standing at a touchscreen than they do at a non-interactive screen. This means they are exposed to your brand and your content for larger stretches of time.

Something about touch also feels intuitive, and there is some scientific evidence to suggest that it is vital in memory-encoding. So, when it comes to interactive digital signage, haptic triggers are almost certainly a must. But also consider other aspects, such as the physical frame around the screen itself – is it smooth, or pleasant to touch? What about rounded corners?

Then there's the space people stand in when using the screens. Yes, you can have a touchscreen or interactive kiosk just standing on the floor, or you could increase the tactile experience by putting a soft pad in front of the screen for people to stand on. This would not only visually enhance the kiosk (since there’s a clear place to stand to use the screen), but also be more comfortable, which in turn might create a more positive experience for the user.

Of course, you also have to consider ADA regulations, and make sure touchscreens are wheelchair accessible, and that any padding you add doesn’t interfere with the operation of a wheel chair or trip visually-impaired people.

Touch elements are also useful when creating and deploying gamified digital signage campaigns. Whether your screen is used for a game, a survey, a quiz or some other gamified element, you can include haptics to give your audience instant tactile feedback on their responses.

Stay tuned for part three which will look at how taste can improve your digital signage.

Image via Istock.com.

About Ellyce Kelly

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