Founder Simon Faure-Field’s passion for improving the experiences of customers has put him at the cutting edge of techniques that make hotel lobbies, bank branches and shops more attractive to spend time in. Simon has named this sector the “sensory branding” industry, the aggressive new kid on the block in the advertising and branding world.
It started when he entered the telephone messaging business in1998 with the setting-up of Equal Strategy. Fed up with what he saw as the one-size fits all solution to corporate recorded phone messages, where nearly all companies have the same monotonous waiting muzak, he decided to offer companies a solution.
Equal Strategy introduced a ‘messages on hold’ service so that customers calling helplines would get the answers they wanted faster through the correct design of Interactive Voice Recordings (IVRs) and a more enjoyable experience through the selection of brand-appropriate music. Dead waiting time is therefore converted into an opportunity to advertise corporate brands or introduce new products and services.
Tired of listening to poor quality music in restaurants and hotel lobbies he introduced Equal Strategy’s Location Media Management service dedicated to improving the quality of ambient music.
Equal Strategy has grown rapidly from its base in Singapore to service clients throughout Asia, including global names that know they have to be at the cutting edge of branding. The company has completed projects for big name hospitality and financial service brands from Marina Bay Sands, Starwood Hotels, New Balance, Resort World Group, Pan Pacific Hotel Group, Shangri-La, Keppel, Citibank, to Standard Chartered, and UOB Private Bank.
Entire retail malls, such as Marina Bay Sands have taken the lead in adopting a more systematic and integrated approach to music programming on their premises. We call this soundscaping by its technical name “music styling”. This takes into account factors such as visitor and tenant profiles, the varieties of usage of the space, the way in which the space is “branded” and different levels of music “arousal” for different times of the day, depending on the natural bioreadings of the shoppers.
It wasn’t long before Simon was exploring the world of the customer in a truly holistic fashion with the introduction of Equal Strategy’s fragrancing service. Fragrances are a powerful brand-building tool because our sense of smell is the only sense directly linked to our centre for memory and emotion in our brain. In fact, over 70% of our emotions are based on what we smell.
Equal Strategy also scented the Shanghai Expo Pavilion and provides outdoor fragrancing at the annual Formula 1 event in Singapore as well as the event’s exclusive indoor Podium Lounge. The company also works closely with New Balance, having provided music and fragrancing for its Shanghai and London Olympics concept stores. It also provided music and scent for Standard Chartered Bank’s Hong Kong branch which was the most expensive branch in the bank’s history. What was particularly interesting about this project was the matching of music and scent to the differing customer profiles in each part of the bank.
What started as a simple quest to improve the lot of the helpline caller has evolved to play a major role throughout the complete customer journey.
Specialties
#Sensory branding, #messages on hold, #scent marketing, #in-store music styling, #interactive voice response, #ambient lighting