Designing branded atmospheres: nature-inspired, multisensory spatial brand experiences for consumer electronics retail stores

Abstract

Copyright © 2019 The Author(s). In today’s saturated market, meaningful emotional appeal becomes the key differentiative factor for physical retailers. The path to human emotion is through the senses, but spatial design still faces a limited understanding of sensory compatibility. Nature, however, benefits human wellbeing especially because of its sensory fluency. This research, therefore, tried to address: How can nature-inspired design improve multisensory brand experiences for more meaningful emotional connections with customers? A combination of qualitative and quantitative research approach was applied in order to identify the patterns in people's perceptions and experiences of nature and of the brands. The findings showed that the brand personality concept can mediate the meaning and emotion from nature to brand experience, based on a surprisingly high agreement during the experiment of associating nature to brand personalities. This unexpected finding enabled identifying brand personalities’ sensory patterns, and re-imagining the retail atmosphere design process with the nature-inspired experience theme. Copyright © 2019. The copyright of each paper in this conference proceedings is the property of the author(s).