Re-juvenate creativity: sensory workshops

New cross-modal ways of designing and thinking are leading to much richer experiences. Multi-sensory is fast becoming the norm and not the exception. It has direct impact on behaviour, mood, pace and commerce.

The senses are powerful, demanding physical and emotional responses and appealing directly to instinct, memory and emotions. Creativity requires every sense, but we often don’t call on their help. We help agencies to stretch creativity to new places and bring our sensory expertise and network to unleash those powerful tools, adding new dimensions to your projects.

Kick off the New Year with a fresh approach and re-connect with your senses. Here’s a quick overview of some of the things we offer:

Sensory Workshops

Sensory workshops push different buttons and extend the boundaries of creative thinking and expression. We create these bespoke to requirements or we also have tried and tested formats. 

Sensory Events and Talks

Inspire and engage audiences. Introduction to sensory design or crafted to your event/subject. Bespoke talks and seminars on the power of the senses seminar and keynotes.

Sensory Surgeries

Call us in to brainstorm and workshop ideas and add an extra dimensions to your creative teams or send over the brief, concepts or presentations and we’ll add ideas / smells / sounds.

Sensory Creative and Consultancy

Stand out. Using the senses makes concepts shine, give your ideas the impact they deserve.

To find out more call Claire on 07779229938 or email us at feel@vetyver.co.uk.

Sensory Christmas #4: Made to Measure

The After Eight pouch, the Toblerone mountain, the pop of a Snapple, the pitch of a Ferrari, the smell of a Bentley, the colour of a Tiffany box, the sonic mnemonic of Intel. It is the unique signifiers which distinguish your brand and allow people to fall in love with it. Everything you do should strengthen your brand narrative.

Everyone does Christmas so how do you stand out from the crowd and ensure that you are not lost in the nose?

The winter holidays every year are a great opportunity to do something special which will bring joy moments of joy to people, but this is frequently a missed opportunity as brands reach for easy off the shelf options.

A brand has a positioning, a set of values and a story and the way your brand behaves should reflect that in every way. Even a Christmas theme should be designed specifically to reflect your brand in the same way your logo and colour palette do. It is particulary important in the competitive Christmas market not to loose your point of difference - sounds and scents should be designed for your brand.

Christmas always feels like it comes more quicker than we are expecting, but it doesn’t need to take long to create sounds and smells. A sensory footprint can be created by experiences: hot toddies, chocolatiers, buskers, a bell over the door, or rung behind the bar like in It's a Wonderful Life, or a simple soundscape.

Stand out with sensory design, tune in to your senses and tune into Christmas.

Sensory Virtual Reality

Image by Nan Palmero Creative Commons 2.0 licence

We are increasingly asked about virtual reality which spurred us to think seriously about how it relates to sensory experience and the potential for this emerging group of technologies. How can sensory design be used to improve the overall VR experience?

Reality itself is essentially virtual: it's what our brain tells us is real from the received sensory inputs. So it follows that true immersive VR needs to pay attention to all of the senses.

VR headsets from the likes of Oculus, Samsung and others have been getting a lot of attention.  The technology is progressing at a pace, but, with the exception of a few prototypes, they focus on our ability to SEE and HEAR the world around us. The bulky gear almost entirely covers the face, concentrating on these senses, obscuring and confusing others and even contributing to motion sickness. It’s worth considering whether this is the ‘reality’ you want your customers to associate with your brand.

Smell, taste, touch, temperature, balance, wind, perception of depth and many lesser known senses contribute to an engaging experience. And the technology for these seems a long way off.

At Vetyver, authenticity is important to us and when considering VR for a project, this is at the forefront of our thoughts.

The best examples of VR go beyond the video game extension style headset. They harness the power of technology to tell a story and are not led by it. Good VR draws on the qualities which are important for us in all our work be this storytelling, sound design, scent and the way that all of them combine. To give a couple of examples,  this installation from Nick Ryan is truly transportative in two senses of the word. And The Guardian have cleverly used a deceptively simple VR experience of a prison cell to accentuate artful sounds design and storytelling.

Is VR the right choice? You want to create moments of joy for your customers which are authentic, memorable and in tune with your brand values. In any situation, be this shop, exhibition or in bar experience, you want your customers completely emerged in your brand and your values. Is a headset experience doing this? There is a danger of you becoming a shop window for the hardware.

New VR technology is fun and we will certainly enjoy pushing it to to the limits of its potential. We are a long way away from a virtual world which comes anything close to the real one. For us, authenticity will always be the ultimate aim.

Sometimes, the thing which smells most like a lemon, is well, a lemon. Take a step back. How do you want your brand to FEEL?

To chat about Sensory Virtual Reality email us at feel@vetyver.co.uk

Photo by Matt Biddulph under creative commons 2.0

Sensory Workshops

 

Sensory experiences help teams access memories, emotions and ideas, offering new ways to access and express their creativity. We often visit creative agencies to help their teams think outside of normal working practices and learn to unleash the power of the senses. The sessions are interactive and can be flexible to suit the needs of the agency.

We recently visited RPM to spend a lunchtime looking at the power of smell. Specifically, how it can be used in conjunction with the senses of sight and smell to create a specific mood and sense of place.

Firstly, participants listened to an atmospheric soundscape created by Vetyver and were asked to imagine a scene, a place or memories the soundscape evoked. The team took us through forest fires, to a childhood summers on the beach, to a glacier and then to dinosaurs on the moon.

Then came the fun part. The team spent time working together to experiment and combine different scents with the aim of coming up with one which matched the narratives and places imagined by them. Then we played the soundscapes with different visuals completely altering their perceptions and creating new narratives - we could have started all over again!

As is always the case with smell sessions, the activity really captured the imagination of the people involved. 

To enquire about a workshop where you work, please get in touch. feel@vetyver.co.uk

Sensory beer tasting

Drinking is one of the truly multi-sensory pleasures of this world and recently we were asked by a leading beer brand to consider the way that the senses can be engaged to heighten the taste experience of their product.

Different types of music, instruments, words, smells and colours can alter the way our brains process the world and can be used to heighten, diminish and change our flavour perceptions.  The drink itself doesn’t change, it is merely our perception of it —  how the brain interprets the information.

We designed soundscapes, sensory experiences and smells appealing to specific attributes of their beer and tested the theory in workshops with agency and brand ambassadors.

Did you know? A higher pitched song will make people taste the beer as sharper, fresher and different tempos and instruments also affect our perception of taste. The participants found that some smells highlighted the presence of certain flavour components in the beer, while others provoked revulsion or obscured the taste completely. Would you imagine cucumber or chives would be the scents that you would pair with beer?

As with all our work, it’s the application of the senses and how the brand experience FEELS that is most important. 

Workshops offer the opportunity to test the theory and refine our work, whilst sharing with others. Vetyver offer a number of sessions which give brands and agencies the opportunity to learn about what we do and get creative thinking about the possibilities of sensory marketing.

Get in contact with us to find out more feel@vetyver.co.uk

HENDRICKS: The great phantasmagorical excursion

The world's most spectacular top hat

Experience being the first fish to traverse the celestial cosmos (and other stories). Brilliantly scripted, this crazy concept campaign goes from bar events to digital campaign. We collaborated with Gravity Thinking to create a playful, disorientating sonic brand experience. A great examples of sensory branding including theatre, tone of voice, audio, visual and experiential. Great client, great brand. Now up for Yellow Pencil Design Award. *crosses fingers*

Smelly cities

We are excited to be contributing to a book about designing for smell in memory of the inspriational Victoria Henshaw, with Kate McLean amongst other editors. Here's a comprehensive article about her work in The Guardian, including her latest project in Singapore.

http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/oct/07/smell-amsterdam-cannabis-odour-mappers-kate-mclean

Sensory Shudder

The gap between a cupcake and a cookie is slim, so why does this just seem so wrong? For most, the Oreo brand is firmly rooted in childhood and our adult foray is based on nostalgia.

Oreos hop the divide from childhood to adulthood as a trip down memory lane and as an ingredient in puddings. But to adopt the mantle of red velvet just doesn't work.  Is it because Red Velvet cakes are an adult concept, rooted in seduction, or is it because Red Velvet cakes already teeter on a sensory line between divine and vile? The sensory conceipt of heavy fabric, stem roses and blood render them almost inedible, but the lightness of cake, purity of snow and butter clouds seem to pull Red Velvet back from the brink of the macabre. 

Not so with the Oreo. Hard, artficially flavored, cream cheese flavored 'creme', sandwich biscuits. Red. Sensory Shudder. Limited edition a good move wethinks.

Seriously colourful

Colour doesn't really exist, yet football teams with a red kit are statistically more likely to win than teams in other colours (tell that to Chelsea fans); coloured placebo pills affect how effective the pill is (apparently red makes us more sexually receptive and blue more relaxed, um Viagra?); percieved colour changes completely by what's next to it (turn grey to yellow by changing adjacent colours); and Isaac Newton randomly named the colours of the rainbow. 

Cultural responses to colour differ substantially, but they are still common associations and and influence mood and expectation. It's all in the mind but then that's pretty much where everything lies. 

A great article exploring facts and fiction of colour.