Re-evaluating Your Business and How It Is Perceived

Ambience:

This involves all of the factors that we unconsciously consider when entering an environment e.g. a room/open space e.g. sound, smell, colour, and temperature of that area. The same can be applied to products which each have a different ambience either be it a slight difference or a more noticeable one. The role of a marketer is to create the most appropriate ambience for their product/service as possible.

For example in ambience, how is your business’ beliefs, values and brand represented in the colours, vocabulary, sounds and temperature of your product/service. For example, a restaurant is a rather busy environment, the smell of delicious food is wafting around customers as a reminder that they are being presented with a high quality meal. Restaurants will typically adopt a rich red and brown colour scheme as it helps the consumer feel relaxed, and thus more likely to enjoy their experience. On the other hand, nightclubs despite also being very busy, they use a variety of flashing neon colours to generate a sense of adrenaline in order to keep the visitors energised to thus give them the best experience possible. The temperature of the night-club is typically kept at an unnoticeably cool temperature to ensure that visitors do not over-heat while they are there. So while there are some similarities between the industries, they cater to a large audience, they want to ensure the consumer has a good time and that they are comfortable in the environment, they go about things rather differently because they have slightly different ideas of the ideal experience for their customers.

Corporate Branding:

These include signs, symbols and artifacts of the business itself. These signs & symbols act to reassure the user that the product or service that they are using is correct. E.g. going to play at the theatre- it has the logo of the theatre that you are attending, the name of the show you are about to watch, the time of the performance you are attending, the seat that you have purchased to use when watching the show.

Signs and symbols help to reassure customers that they are doing the right thing, are in the right place or are going in the right direction. For instance, tickets for a concert will include the date and time of the event that the consumer purchased the ticket for. This will reassure them that they attended the event at the right date and time as typically there are multiple shows perhaps at the same venue or not. Subsequently they also state the venue, to reassure customers that they are in the right place and it will also say the name of the event they are attending. This may not be as important as it is in cinemas where there are multiple films being shown at the same time and the customer needs to know that they booked the right film at the right time, date and venue. Signs like those indicating the location of the nearest toilets are significant as it gives the customer more information without the customer having to go out of their way to ask a member of staff at the establishment.

Spatial Layout:

This takes into consideration how furniture is laid out within a room or space. E.g. the seats in a cinema/aeroplane. These arrangements are typically for specific purpose and are thus mandatory.

Objects like seats can also be very purposefully laid out and can contribute to the typical iconography of a place because it is so expected. For example, the seats in a cinema are typically in rows, one seat besides, front and behind one another. This will have been calculated carefully by the venue to fit the most people as possible in the room without detracting from the experience e.g. each person has plenty of room and there is no obstructed viewing.

On the other hand, it can also be due to a mandatory safety measure or practice like on an aeroplane where the seat arrangement varies only slightly world wide and it largely depends on the size of the plane. Like the seats in the cinema, they have satisfactory space for all customers but are designed to hold as many as they safely can. This is especially true as these arrangements do play a role in whether an aeroplane is safe to take off.

We hope that this has given you some ideas on aspects of your marketing that affect how your demographic perceives your business and perhaps has been able to inspire you to think about how you can effectively market to your ideal client.

We look forward to hearing from you.