Synaesthetic Marketing - a Phrase All Bars and Restaurants Need to Know
Posted on Thu 21st Apr 2016 at 11:37
It’s not just enough to have a killer wine list, now top academics have said that you have to create the right ambience if you want your customers to truly enjoy wine.
Addressing the global Wine Vision conference, professors Charles Spence and Barry Smith explained that humans are influenced by the full range of senses when it comes to experiencing wine. Although the taste and smell of the wines are pretty obvious, the professors cited experiments that demonstrate how important sound and colour, and even context, are to the enjoyment of wine. To illustrate their point, they mentioned the common experience of enjoying a wine on holiday, then getting back home to find that the bottles you’ve bought contain a much less pleasant-tasting liquid. If restaurants and bars can create a pleasant atmosphere, therefore, customers are already primed to have a positive response to the wines you serve.
This attention to the peripheral details is known as “synaesthetic marketing” or "digital seasoning" and is already happening in many bars and restaurants. Venues such as Islington’s House of Wolf, for example, are already using music to make their food seem more sweet or bitter, depending on the desired effect. ‘Synaesthetic’ means stimulating one sense to provoke reactions in another, and there are easy ways for bars and restaurants to use this to their advantage.
If you can create an emotional connection between your customers and the wine you serve, then you create a loyalty that is hard to shake. Rango’s restaurant in London, for example, have optimised the ambiance in their restaurant to reflect the powerful nature of their food offering - juicy steaks cooked on a hot stone. Under this ambiance, customers are more inclined to pick stronger, more tannic wines, and Stobi’s excellent selection have been picked for just this purpose. Wines such as Stobi’s Vranec already pair beautifully with red meats, but the mood lighting adds an additional aspect to this - partly because the colour deepens the purple hues in the wine. “We couldn’t have picked a better selection of wines to go with our signature steaks” commented the Managing Director of this popular restaurant. “Customers love not only the aroma and taste of the wine, but also the story of the Macedonian vineyard from where it originates. Our food offering is innovative and our clients love having an unusual wine to pair with it”.