Arouse Patrons’ Sensations

Close your eyes as you rub the cashmere sweater against your cheek. Notice how it augments the sensation of the texture. Close your eyes as you sip the wine and then chew the food. Notice how closing off the visual channel arouses the taste sensation.
     Oh, wait. I realize we’re dining at Dans Le Noir?, with the question mark at the end. The question mark is fitting since even with eyes open, the diners must depend on their sense of taste to figure out what they’re being served. At the Dans Le Noir? restaurants in NYC, Paris, London, Barcelona, Casablanca, and Russia’s St. Petersburg, you’ll be dining in the dark. Served by visually impaired staff. Required to sign a liability release and adhere to rules that forbid you from moving to another table without guidance and authorize the restaurant to video record you and the other guests using night-vision equipment. On this variant of a blind date, any hanky-panky is subject to search.
     The chefs take care to keep the flavors distinct in the offerings because the patrons enjoy picking apart each taste, an endeavor made easier since each taste is more striking in the pitch black. A regular customer complaint is that the voices of the other diners are uncomfortably loud. That’s probably because people do tend to raise their voice volume when in an unfamiliar situation. It’s almost surely because the sense of sound is sharpened when you’re deprived of the sense of sight.
     Which sense modalities will do the best job of selling the products you offer? The touch of the sweater? The taste of the food or wine? The smell of the perfume or incense? The sound of the entertainment center? One way to arouse that sense modality for your shoppers is to limit the other sense modalities.
     Just close your eyes, you might say.
     To be sure, there are the items where you want the eyes wide open because sight is your route of appeal. Also, sensations can positively arouse one another. In Buyology, Martin Lindstrom writes:

I often ask audiences to close their eyes. After tearing a piece of paper in two, I ask them what happened. “You just ripped a piece of paper in two,” they murmur, their eyes still shut. It’s not just that they recognized the sound of ripping paper; they were actually visualizing me rip the paper in half. 

For your profitability: Sell Well: What Really Moves Your Shoppers

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