The implications of Sensory and Experience Design can be found in everything from product development to package design. When we talk about SenEx Design we are talking about how real people react to their experience with products and marketing presentations.

We experience the world through our senses: sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste. Stand in a supermarket and watch people shop for fruit and vegetables; they pick them up, squeeze them, turn them over and over looking for flaws, smell them, and if the store keeper isn't looking they may even have a taste. When people buy a car, they look at the specifications listed in the brochure, but they still go to the showroom, kick the t

We read the newspaper, we watch television, and we listen to the radio, but we experience the Web; this is what makes 'The Website' one of the most powerful marketing tools available to today's marketing executives. Unfortunately conventional wisdom has stifled the 'experience factor' on most website presentations.

Traditional circulation based advertising biases and pitch-mandated direct mail practices from metric-minded agencies have limited businesses' ability to take advantage of the Web's capacity to provide a more active, creative, and penetrating sensory experience aimed at furthering marketing objectives.

As consumers of information we all filter what our mind considers irrelevant. When we go to a website we quickly recognize where banner and text advertisements have been placed and proceed to ignore them for the rest of our visit. Even television ads are becoming increasing less effective, even as their cost increases. Yet people will watch and even look forward to creative, entertaining advertisements that capture our imagination and inform our ability to make better decisions about what we buy and who we buy from.

Does Anybody Really Know What Works?

It is easy to rely on after-the-fact number crunching and projected head-numbing statistics to justify how marketing campaigns are constructed rather than on the less predictable but more relevant elements of psychology and human nature. But do numbers really tell the true story, or are they just protect-your-butt justification designed to ease everyone's mind when it comes time to commit to a budget?

Take the entertainment industry for example. Here is an industry that can tell you how many people watched a particular television show on a per minute basis. So if these and the other cerebral-cortex-boggling figures are so telling, why do networks have such a hard time delivering programs that people will watch; or do they yank new potentially successful shows off-the-air based on their initial numbers before they ever have a chance to find an audience?

Television is such an expensive medium, its practitioners have come to rely on seemly safe, tried, hackneyed old formula, knowing that it is easier to sell sponsors what used to work, even when they know there is little chance of it working again. The fact is nobody really knows what combination of stories, writers, actors and producers is going to capture the publics' imagination.

So what does this have to do with Web-marketing? Everything. The Web is not an expensive production medium and that allows marketers to experiment with different techniques and creative. Unless your Web-business is a circulation-based advertising model, there is no reason to limit your creative marketing to worn-out concepts and number-based incentive formats that for the most part, no longer work.

Sensory and Experience Design Concepts

The essence of good advertising and its big brother marketing, is creative story telling; stories presented effectively, inform, persuade, and penetrate our consciousness based on their ability to tap into our sensory experiences. There has developed over the last few years two new approaches to design that acknowledge this powerful aspect of human nature: Sensory and Experience Design.

The implications of Sensory and Experience Design can be found in everything from product development to package design. When we talk about SenEx Design we are talking about how real people react to their experience with products and marketing presentations.

We experience the world through our senses: sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste. Stand in a supermarket and watch people shop for fruit and vegetables; they pick them up, squeeze them, turn them over and over looking for flaws, smell them, and if the store keeper isn't looking they may even have a taste. When people buy a car, they look at the specifications listed in the brochure, but they still go to the showroom, kick the ti

Does Anybody Really Know What Works?

It is easy to rely on after-the-fact number crunching and projected head-numbing statistics to justify how marketing campaigns are constructed rather than on the less predictable but more relevant elements of psychology and human nature. But do numbers really tell the true story, or are they just protect-your-butt justification designed to ease everyone's mind when it comes time to commit to a budget?

Take the entertainment industry for example. Here is an industry that can tell you how many people watched a particular television show on a per minute basis. So if these and the other cerebral-cortex-boggling figures are so telling, why do networks have such a hard time delivering programs that people will watch; or do they yank new potentially successful shows off-the-air based on their initial numbers before they ever have a chance to find an audience?

Television is such an expensive medium, its practitioners have come to rely on seemly safe, tried, hackneyed old formula, knowing that it is easier to sell sponsors what used to work, even when they know there is little chance of it working again. The fact is nobody really knows what combination of stories, writers, actors and producers is going to capture the publics' imagination.

So what does this have to do with Web-marketing? Everything. The Web is not an expensive production medium and that allows marketers to experiment with different techniques and creative. Unless your Web-business is a circulation-based advertising model, there is no reason to limit your creative marketing to worn-out concepts and number-based incentive formats that for the most part, no longer work.

Sensory and Experience Design Concepts

The essence of good advertising and its big brother marketing, is creative story telling; stories presented effectively, inform, persuade, and penetrate our consciousness based on their ability to tap into our sensory experiences. There has developed over the last few years two new approaches to design that acknowledge this powerful aspect of human nature: Sensory and Experience Design.

The implications of Sensory and Experience Design can be found in everything from product development to package design. When we talk about SenEx Design we are talking about how real people react to their experience with products and marketing presentations.

We experience the world through our senses: sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste. Stand in a supermarket and watch people shop for fruit and vegetables; they pick them up, squeeze them, turn them over and over looking for flaws, smell them, and if the store keeper isn't looking they may even have a taste. When people buy a car, they look at the specifications listed in the brochure, but they still go to the showroom, kick the t

Take the entertainment industry for example. Here is an industry that can tell you how many people watched a particular television show on a per minute basis. So if these and the other cerebral-cortex-boggling figures are so telling, why do networks have such a hard time delivering programs that people will watch; or do they yank new potentially successful shows off-the-air based on their initial numbers before they ever have a chance to find an audience?

Television is such an expensive medium, its practitioners have come to rely on seemly safe, tried, hackneyed old formula, knowing that it is easier to sell sponsors what used to work, even when they know there is little chance of it working again. The fact is nobody really knows what combination of stories, writers, actors and producers is going to capture the publics' imagination.

So what does this have to do with Web-marketing? Everything. The Web is not an expensive production medium and that allows marketers to experiment with different techniques and creative. Unless your Web-business is a circulation-based advertising model, there is no reason to limit your creative marketing to worn-out concepts and number-based incentive formats that for the most part, no longer work.

Sensory and Experience Design Concepts

The essence of good advertising and its big brother marketing, is creative story telling; stories presented effectively, inform, persuade, and penetrate our consciousness based on their ability to tap into our sensory experiences. There has developed over the last few years two new approaches to design that acknowledge this powerful aspect of human nature: Sensory and Experience Design.

The implications of Sensory and Experience Design can be found in everything from product development to package design. When we talk about SenEx Design we are talking about how real people react to their experience with products and marketing presentations.

We experience the world through our senses: sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste. Stand in a supermarket and watch people shop for fruit and vegetables; they pick them up, squeeze them, turn them over and over looking for flaws, smell them, and if the store keeper isn't looking they may even have a taste. When people buy a car, they look at the specifications listed in the brochure, but they still go to the showroom, kick the t

So what does this have to do with Web-marketing? Everything. The Web is not an expensive production medium and that allows marketers to experiment with different techniques and creative. Unless your Web-business is a circulation-based advertising model, there is no reason to limit your creative marketing to worn-out concepts and number-based incentive formats that for the most part, no longer work.

Sensory and Experience Design Concepts

The essence of good advertising and its big brother marketing, is creative story telling; stories presented effectively, inform, persuade, and penetrate our consciousness based on their ability to tap into our sensory experiences. There has developed over the last few years two new approaches to design that acknowledge this powerful aspect of human nature: Sensory and Experience Design.

The implications of Sensory and Experience Design can be found in everything from product development to package design. When we talk about SenEx Design we are talking about how real people react to their experience with products and marketing presentations.

We experience the world through our senses: sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste. Stand in a supermarket and watch people shop for fruit and vegetables; they pick them up, squeeze them, turn them over and over looking for flaws, smell them, and if the store keeper isn't looking they may even have a taste. When people buy a car, they look at the specifications listed in the brochure, but they still go to the showroom, kick the t

The implications of Sensory and Experience Design can be found in everything from product development to package design. When we talk about SenEx Design we are talking about how real people react to their experience with products and marketing presentations.

We experience the world through our senses: sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste. Stand in a supermarket and watch people shop for fruit and vegetables; they pick them up, squeeze them, turn them over and over looking for flaws, smell them, and if the store keeper isn't looking they may even have a taste. When people buy a car, they look at the specifications listed in the brochure, but they still go to the showroom, kick the tires, run their hands along the shinny new paint, smell the leather interior, and take that sucker for a test drive to see how she handles. It's all about experiencing the product through our senses - it's that sensory experience that becomes imbedded in our memory.

To date most companies have lagged in their efforts to implement these new SenEx marketing communication approaches on their websites due to their obsession with search engine optimization issues that focus on the volume of traffic rather than the quality of the marketing message. Business seems to be stuck in a circulation-based advertising and mass-market mindset that runs contrary to the Web's niche market 'Long Tail' nature and its ability to communicate by presenting information that appeals to a variety of senses.

Search Engine Optimization Issues

No one will argue with the desire of website owners to attract large numbers of viewers to their sites. But this desire has spawned an entire industry of people claiming to be able to provide website owners with the holy grail of search engine optimization: making it to the top spot in an organic search on your favorite search engine.

Not everyone willing to pay for an S.E.O. expert to optimize his or her site can be number one in an organic search. And of course there is the issue of paid search placement that trumps organic searches.

As fast as search engine optimization experts develop ways to beat the search engines, the experts at the search engines change their algorithms, and my money is on the guys at Google.

When it comes to search engine optimization consider the following important issues and questions: 1. Do the search engine tactics employed on your site degrade, obscure, or in some way diminish the ability of your website visitors to quickly find the information they want? 2. Do these search engine tactics impede your ability to effectively deliver your marketing message in a way that attracts attention, triggers relevant sensory experience, and embeds your message in your visitors' memories? 3. Do tactics like outbound reciprocal links and inline body-text links send people away from your site when you want them to stick around and hear what you have to say? 4. Do you have excessive repetitive copy-text on your site aimed at being indexed by search engines rather than read by people for clear concise understanding? 5. Have you reduced your complex message or instructions to a series of bulleted points that confuse rather than clarify? 6. Do your search engine tactics concentrate on the volume of traffic rather than the quality? 7. Is the traffic you're attracting leaving your site as fast as it's arriving?

The lesson we should learn from SenEx Design concepts is that websites need to be designed for people not search engines. Delivering a clearly understandable marketing message is achieved by tapping into the psychological and emotional responses triggered by sensory experiences. That is how you need to communicate to an audience separated from you by the vast expanse of the Internet.

SenEx Web Design Using Audio and Video Techniques

People are hungry for information. In today's fast-paced world the aver