Multi-sensory events are best strategy
When executing an event for a client, there is invariably a list of things to pay particular attention to. Most of those things are designed to be appealing in the visual, tactile and aural sense. A sense of taste is also considered with food and beverages, but there is one thing that is often overlooked.
Smell.
Smell is a chemical sense tied directly to the emotional center of the brain. This sense is immensely powerful and can cause our heart rate to change, our mouths to water or evoke memories of more pleasurable times.
Smell can also make us buy.
The power of scent is not fully understood, but can be successfully applied to the marketing of virtually any product.
In fact, Nike once paid for a study that concluded that most people will buy more shoes (and be willing to pay a higher price) if the room smelled like flowers. Ever noticed when you go look at a new house or apartment, someone seems to be baking cookies? That smell is used to make you feel like you are (safely) at home.
If smell can influence people to subconsciously react to a stimulus, why don’t we, as B2B communicators, pay more attention to it? The answer? We don’t have the experience to put it into practice, putting us one step behind our B2C counterparts. But we are all emotional creatures, even in B2B, so smell should be considered as a part of your marketing mix—especially at an event. Want to attract people? Appeal to their senses.
Our client, Seal-Tite, makes pressure-activated sealants that Oil and Gas companies use to plug leaks in their wells. It works by injecting liquid sealant into the well, remaining liquid until it encounters a change in pressure, i.e. a leak, then solidifies and plugs it up, similar to the platelets in our bloodstream. Seal-Tite sealants can save companies millions in lost revenue from well downtime.
For the Seal-Tite tradeshow experience, we devised a concept of ‘Cool Chemistry’. We contacted a particular UK chef, who was attempting to break the world record for making a litre of solid ice cream. He agreed to perform his record-breaking attempt at the Seal-Tite booth at the show. He used liquid nitrogen to solidify the ice cream in seconds, not unlike how Seal-Tite sealants work. We built up a crowd around the booth, and the record was broken — the chef made solid vanilla ice cream in 6.35 seconds, shaving 3.99 seconds off the existing record.
Read more and watch the movie in our 'Creative Pride' article.
Most importantly for our client, the results were astounding. Seal-Tite drew an additional 50-100 attendees to their booth every day, above their average and the engagement was through the roof. In addition, in that one show alone, they obtained more qualified sales leads than all of their previous five shows.
Ice-cream stunts aren’t exactly the stuff of your average B2B tool kit at an Oil & Gas trade show. But people loved it. Seal-Tite made an emotional connection with customers by entertaining and educating them without being too gimmicky — we didn’t just slap brochures in one hand and ice cream in the other.
People were driven by their senses to the booth by a sound creative concept that appealed to the audience’s curious side and the human enjoyment of sensory experiences. And let’s face it, who doesn’t love ice cream? So next time you get tasked with a client event, if you want to attract customers think about the surroundings. The answer might be right in front of your nose.