My last column two weeks ago explored the importance of the five senses — vision, hearing, touch, smell, and taste — for design and innovation. Products, services, and brands that appeal to the senses influence perceived value and increase sales. Building on that insight, here are three concrete actions to increase the sensory appeal of your offerings:

1. Cultivate your individual sensory awareness

Before you can improve the sensory dimensions of your designs, you must first learn to improve your own sensory awareness and perception. Here are a few things that you can do to train your sensory awareness:

• Henry David Thoreau said, “The question is not what you look at, but what you see.” Most of us think we have good vision, but this doesn’t mean that we can really see. Our vision can trick us, as in the many visual illusions. We also suffer from perceptual blind spots where we selectively focus our attention on some aspects of a situation while ignoring others. A great way to learn to see better is to take up drawing.

• Attend an orchestral performance and pay close attention to the different instruments and the interplay between them. Or close your eyes on the subway and listen to the individual voices around you.

• “Some people feel the rain. Others just get wet,” said Bob Marley. Train your sense of touch by walking barefoot on various surfaces, hugging a tree, or simply being aware of the feel of wind, sun, and rain on your skin.

• The French epicure Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin said, “Smell and taste are in fact but a single composite sense, whose laboratory is the mouth and its chimney the nose.” Training your senses of smell and taste is easy — just consciously pay attention to the smell and taste of what you eat and drink.

• Finally, a fun way to exercise most of your senses at once is to go to a wine tasting with friends or colleagues, and enjoy seeing, feeling, smelling and tasting different wines. Be sure to discuss the sensory impressions that you had of the wines.

2. Conduct a sensory audit

To discover the sensory value of your offerings or brand, perform a sensory audit. Find out how your customers perceive your products through each of the senses. For touch, for instance, ask if your product feels soft or hard, small or large, rough or smooth, constant or intermittent, hot or cold, and light or heavy. Once you’ve done this for all five senses, you will have a sensory profile of your product. Do the same for competing products. This will help identify areas where you can improve your sensory design.

At Thinkergy, we recently surveyed stakeholders to see how our corporate brand was perceived. The resulting profile showed that Thinkergy looks light, large, colorful, and fast. The brand sounds loud, fast, and rhythmic. It feels bubbly, smooth, and light, and shifts between hot and cool. The smell and taste is strong, sweet-and-sour, and spicy. We are now using the insights from this sensory audit to design new sensory branding items.

3. Combine the senses

Vladimir Nabokov, who wrote Lolita, saw the letters of English as colors. This is an example of synesthesia, where senses get combined, so that, for instance, a particular musical note has a specific color, or a noise has a taste. Many creative people were synesthetes, including the composers Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Franz Liszt and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, the painter Wassily Kandinsky, the philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Ludwig Wittgenstein, the writer Victor Hugo, and the physicist Richard Feynman. These people used their unusual gift to produce interesting cross-sensory combinations. For the rest of us, artificial synesthesia can help to find new ways to improve our sensory designs. Mix different sensory stimuli to find new combinations that lead to ideas. Need a new dessert? Imagine one that feels cold and has a mild smell, but tastes hot and spicy. How about coconut ice cream with a hot strawberry-chili core?

Humans are sensory beings. Designs that appeal more, to more senses, are more valuable. Designing a product for all five senses makes using that product more pleasurable. It intensifies and deepens the customer’s experience; it creates deeper emotional connections to a brand. So use your senses to do better and stand out from the crowd.

© Dr. Detlef Reis 2012. This article was published in parallel in the Bangkok Post under the title “Sensing innovation (Part 2): Adding value” on 1 March 2012.