EMOTIONAL BRANDING
Communicate through immersive installations
Applications:
From their original artistic contexts, immersive installations have been adopted by the communication world as a corporate marketing medium.
The high emotional involvement they are able to provoke, their ability to transport visitors inside other realities, and their degree of memorability are very attractive features for brand communication. Immersive installations are a powerful tool for personally engaging potential customers, giving them enjoyable moments and helping to establish a solid bond with the brand, increasing its positioning and awareness.
Emotional Marketing
It has been since the 1990s that slogans, photographic images, television commercials, and social campaigns have focused on emotionally engaging the viewer. Thanks to neuroscientific studies on choice behavior, and the subsequent emergence of neuromarketing, it was discovered how the emotional component plays a central role in decision-making and purchasing processes. Storytelling has become the main strategy in brand communication. Indeed, stories have a powerful evocative power in the human mind; they stimulate the imagination, recall memories, and excite. However, the most widely used techniques in current marketing all have a great and insurmountable physical limitation: the frame. The edges of the screen, of the television set, of the billboard, the narrative is confined to a space distinctly separate from that of the viewer. The senses addressed are primarily sight and, in the case of commercials, hearing. Music transcends the physical limits of the frame and is capable of generating emotional responses even more powerful than those generated by sight.
The role of senses
Our sensory perception is what puts us in touch with the world, which allows us to orient ourselves within it, thanks in part to the emotional responses that are generated by it. In a given situation, the more senses involved the stronger the emotional response generated by them.
And therein lies the strength of immersive installations; many more senses can be involved compared to traditional communication. To sight and hearing it is possible to add smell, touch (either through touching or temperature regulation) and, in some cases, even taste!
But the sense that is most stimulated in immersive installations is proprioception, which is the ability to perceive and control our bodies within space. In immersive installations, space is altered, the body enters an illusory reality and perceives itself within it.
Associated with corporate communication, all this translates into an almost total involvement of the user who finds themselves enveloped by the soul of the brand, interacting no longer only with their eyes or ears, but with their entire physique and personality.
It is possible to create abstract or realistic settings, build narratives, or create explorable worlds, all with a varied combination of techniques and tools such as LED walls, projections, video mapping, holograms, interactive tables, transparent screens, touch monitors, kinetic installations, and real-world setups all the way to augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality. There are no limits of expression, as long as the designed experience is in line with the identity of the commissioning brand and conveys the desired message.
Melinda Golden Theatre by DrawLight
The Melinda Project
A great example of this type of application is the Golden Theatre, designed by DrawLight for Melinda. Here, a cube was built inside which the viewer can see a video projection on the three walls.
The installation is designed to tell the story of Melinda apples and the underground cellars in which they are stored. In this case, therefore, we look to immersive art for marketing because the installation is able to transport the visitor inside our story thanks to evocative images that generate immersive and engaging storytelling.
People, positioned in the center of the cube, are drawn into the story through the sensations generated by their surroundings. In the Golden Theater, spatial references are “augmented” and bring the person to identify with the video projection, even feeling part of the trolley heading deep into the underground cells. The somatic system in this case then processes the spatial information of the projection and uses it as a reference point, generating in the observer sensations of movement. The illusion is so strong that the body escapes conscious control and sways in correspondence with certain movements of the projected trolley!
The Golden Theatre can be visited year-round at MondoMelinda, the visitor center of the Melinda consortium in Segno di Predaia (TN).
Giulia Lazzaretto
Creative Designer DrawLight
Martina Zanotto
Psicologa, esperta in Neuroscienze
Bibliography
Veronica Faccone, Neuromarketing, communication and consumer behavior, Academia.edu
https://www.academia.edu/28472486/
PRPower House, Immersive Brand Experiences: The Art of Experiential Marketing, Maggio 2023, Medium
https://medium.com/@PRPowerhouse_/immersive-brand-experiences-the-art-of-experiential-marketing-d1a803e6b4c
