Commentary
How to use taste to spice up digital signage
Thinking about the sense of taste in regard to digital signage brings up two important ideas. The first is how all the senses work together to create a sense picture or map of our surroundings, and how you can use many techniques to create a full sensory experience for your audience.
November 29, 2018 by Ellyce Kelly — Communications Consultant/Public Relations Special, Visix, Inc.
This is part three of a series analyzing the senses in digital signage. Click here for part two and here for part one,. This final part analyzes how taste can improve your digital signage and the importance of staying on top of multi-sensory technologies.
Last but not least is taste. It may only give us around 1 percent of the information we get from the world, but it’s a powerful sense. It's linked to smell – in fact, around 80 percent of our sense of taste is actually smell (as an experiment, taste something with as strong flavor, like coffee, while holding your nose, and then without holding your nose). The sense of taste has evolved to let us know, among other things, which things are probably good for us and which things we should avoid.
In order to bring taste in to the digital signage experience, you might have things to sample right near the digital sign itself. A table with tasting samples of food or drink is an obvious idea. If that's impractical, have part of your call to action be to go somewhere nearby to try it, and rely on imagery that evokes the memory of tastes your viewers are familiar with.
Thinking about the sense of taste in regard to digital signage brings up two important ideas. The first is how all the senses work together to create a sense picture or map of our surroundings, and how you can use many techniques to create a full sensory experience for your audience.
As an example, let's say you’re advertising burgers at the on-site café. Your digital signage message could have a high-quality picture of a juicy hamburger (and maybe it's a cinemagraph showing steam rising from it, or a short video of a burger being grilled), then there's a 1-2 second sound of sizzling meat, add in the smell of grilling beef, and finally, include a discount code for burger specials at the café (which is only shown on digital signs, so your ROI is built right in). This uses three of the senses to motivate your audience to action.
Which brings up the second idea – extending an encounter beyond the screen. This is probably the primary way you can incorporate taste into the viewer's experience. You can start the process by suggesting taste with visuals and smells, but then have something tangible complete the experience for the audience. (In our example, when they taste the burger.) Remember that the digital signage experience doesn’t end for your viewer until they finish the action you prompt them to take.
Don't wait
All this may seem like something from science-fiction, but the tech is already developed and being improved at a rapid pace. Communicators for all types of organizations can start using these techniques to craft rich experiences for audiences and differentiate their messaging.
These multi-sensory communications create neural connections in the brain that in turn associate the positive experience with the brand making it possible. But make sure your visuals, sounds, scents, haptics or flavors are high quality. Low-quality images, irritating sounds, and smells or tastes that are unpleasant will have the opposite effect from what you’re trying to achieve and leave a negative impression of your communications efforts.
Even if you only add in just one of the sense suggestions here, it will greatly enhance the impact of your digital signage. In a world of constant distraction and information overload, engaging more than just one sense is an effective way to cut through the noise and get your messages noticed. If you'll pardon the pun, using the senses just makes sense.
Image via Istock.com
