A Matter of Taste in Branding
The sense of taste is somewhat elusive in branding. It’s just not something that is usually considered in strategy sessions unless maybe you’re in the food industry. Even if you have a restaurant or cafe, the taste is more of a product feature than a branding device.
Music, smell, and color can be easily imposed on us, through screens and sound systems, but not taste. It feels like it takes much more effort to implement, and the impact is not as scalable.
Taste is the runt of the sense family. But if we give it a bit of attention, it can pave the way to your customers’ hearts (through their stomachs).
Why Comfort Food is so Comforting or the Emotional Effect of Food
The thing with taste is that it is versatile. It’s so good at being there for us when we’re sad or happy, adept at soothing our feelings or rewarding us when we feel we deserve it. When we’re in the company of others, taste is that cup of coffee shared with a colleague at work, lunch with a dear friend, or that late-night pizza party.
Like smell, taste can be very evocative. The 20th-century writer Marcel Proust coined the term involuntary memory and described it so beautifully in his magnum opus, In Search of Lost Time.
“No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me.”
-Marcel Proust: In search of Lost time
What came to bear his name, the Proust effect is a sudden and vivid memory triggered by sensory stimuli. It’s usually an intense and involuntary connection we make with a smell, taste, or sound that leads to reliving past events. One bite of the ratatouille took Ego back to his childhood and his mother’s love.
The Sum of All the Other Senses
Through a narrow lens, taste is rather straightforward: bitter, salty, sour, sweet, and savory. If it were only that, cooking would be a relatively simple affair, and I would nail it. But when taste becomes flavor, the experience becomes infinitely more complex and rich.
A positive taste experience of eating and drinking is about symbiosis and interactions with other senses.
Taste combines all of the other senses, enlisting them to create a multi-layered experience. In a way, it is the most synesthetic sense of all.
1 Taste and smell
The most obvious connection is with the sense of smell, which is where we get the subtle flavors and aromas. Venkatesh N. Murthy, a Neuroscience researcher at the Harvard University, said in an article for The Harvard Gazette:
When you chew, molecules in the food, make their way back retro-nasally to your nasal epithelium, meaning that essentially, all of what you consider flavor is smell. When you are eating all the beautiful, complicated flavors … they are all smell.
Taste and smell are chemical senses as they both sample the environment. Unfortunately, I am highly aware of this fact whenever I smell something foul. I would rather not imagine actual molecules making their way up my nose and mouth. But they are, and I do.
In a way, smell can be seen as the precursor of tasting. The process already starts outside our mouths and in front of our noses. If you like how something smells, you will like how it tastes. And vice-versa.
For branding purposes, you can rely on smell and use it to trigger a taste sensation. For example, instead of sharing taste samples, you can make sure that the smell of baked bread reaches your customers, who can easily imagine the corresponding taste.
2. Taste and sight
Our eyes are an essential part of tasting and perceiving food. All of us subconsciously associate specific colors with distinct tastes and flavors. For most people, red is associated with sweetness, yellow and green with sourness, white with salt, and brown and black with bitterness. This goes back to the same principle I have touched upon before - it builds on the associations we have been exposed to throughout our lives.
These connections are so strong that color and therefore sigh can even override the taste sensation. In several tests, participants were asked to identify the flavor of drinks with unusual coloring for the taste. It turns out that if it’s not red, we have some trouble knowing which one is strawberry.
That’s why color is an essential element of food marketing.
3. Taste and touch
Food texture, or mouthfeel, is how food feels in your mouth as you eat it. Smoothness, viscosity, crunch, and fizz, form a whole experience and contribute to how taste is perceived. For example, we associate crunchy food with fatty and salty, which we are conditioned to crave.
4. Taste and sound
Yes, sound plays a role in perception too. You can tell a lot about the texture of food from the chewing sounds we hear when eating. The latest research shows just how important sound is to our experience and enjoyment of food and drinks. By synchronizing crunching sounds with eating, researchers can track and change a person’s experience of what they think they are eating. So even sound trumps taste when it comes to eating.
Most of the time, though, the senses work together to help us understand what we eat and not trick us on purpose.
A Matter of Taste
This rich interplay of sensory inputs offers highly individual and diverse taste perceptions. With color, we can outline some generic associations. But it’s so much more difficult to generalize taste because preferences vary so wildly from one person to the next. So there is no universal meaning in flavor that we could encode in our branding.
When we take a broader look, we can see some preferences forming from country to country. These are natural consequences of being exposed to different foods as we grow up. But beyond a matter of choice, some of these differences are encoded in our DNA. For example, our receptors for the five primary flavors vary globally. This means that two people from different regions can perceive the same dish differently, as one is more sensitive to particular tastes than the other.
This can be quite a problem for global food chains like Mcdonald's and Starbucks, as they struggle to balance the guaranteed signature taste with the local taste buds. Every time they launch in a new country, they go through extensive research, looking into the culture, history, and regional taste preferences before partnering with local food companies. I still cannot get over McDonald’s in Indonesia has no mayo or mustard sauces, but they have plenty of sweet chilly options. My European taste buds are appalled.
Jokes aside, I love to experience the local culture through food whenever I travel. The food itself is revelatory of the place it comes from, integrating the country’s geography and history in every dish. Much of the colonial events and exploration of the globe have been triggered precisely by this search for spice and taste.
So interlinked with tradition and the people's sense of identity, food is easily infused with a symbolic quality. This often gives people a sense of pride and ownership and sometimes triggers conflicting claims over who owns which food. It can get personal.
How-to Taste Marketing
So, where does that leave us? Taste is the most challenging sense to implement in brand experience because of the difference in perception, but its disadvantage brings up a hidden advantage. Because it is rarely used, marketing strategies that integrate taste are still highly efficient. Ikea is one clear example of using this strategy. Customers come there for the Swedish meatballs and stay for the cup holders.
With longer and warmer days ahead, festivals and parks are great venues to meet your customers. Events, pop-up shops, branded food trucks, and tasty foods can draw in a crowd and get people excited and satisfied. It’s the quickest way to change both mood and brand perception.
Some companies like Firmenich are waking up to this increased attention brands give to taste. In their laboratories, they work to create fragrances, flavors, and ingredients to create emotion. Companies can understand and take advantage of how we perceive and interpret the world to align and strengthen the brand message, building multi-dimensional brands.
The Personal Touch: Taste in your office
If we go back to one of the points I made at the beginning of this article, taste is soothing. A favorable taste experience is care in molecular form.
Say you have a private practice. As a coach, therapist, or architect, you have clients who regularly see you at your office. It’s a privilege to see people face to face nowadays, in this post-pandemic, increasingly digitalized communication.
But if you do meet clients in person, in your office, consider how you could design a beautiful, nurturing experience that targets all the senses, including taste. How about some cookies or freshly roasted coffee?
Making them feel comfortable and taken care of would set a different tone for the conversation in the simplest of ways. It would help them relax, open up, engage, and leave your office with a good feeling—some of it from the conversation and everything else surrounding the discussion.
It’s the little things that end up having the biggest impact.