Carlos Velasco – Researcher of the Month

What do you want to contribute to changing in business or society?

My research helps companies define and differentiate their brands. Let’s say you want customers to identify your beer as premium, or market the sustainability of your brand. Selecting the right sensory inputs on websites, physical shops, packages, and ads, will help you get your message across and attract customers.

Looking to the future, I expect the boundaries between physical and digital to blur even more, and more of our experiences to take place in mixed and virtual reality. This offers exciting new possibilities, but also raises important ethical questions. For example, the fact that experiences are more digitized also mean that they can, in a way, be ‘programmed’. What does this mean for consumers, firms, and our societies at large?

What are some things you’ve found out?

Round shapes communicate a sweet taste. Louder sounds and the colour black communicate luxury.

In a project with the Japanese brewery Asahi, we helped them figure out that a more premium beer experience involves characteristic opening and pouring sounds.

In another project with the Norwegian salmon producer Salma, we found, for instance, that the sound of premium salmon involves classical music, Norwegian folk music and opera. This can be used to differentiate the brand in different marketing communications.