Spatial contiguity principle:
Students learn better when
corresponding words and pictures are presented near to each other
rather than far from each other on the page or screen.
Coherence principle:
Students learn better when extraneous material
is excluded rather than included.
Modality principle:
Students learn better from animation and
narration than from animation and on-screen text.
Sensory branding
Author Judith Viorst once said, “Strength is the capacity to break a
[chocolate] bar into four pieces … and then to eat just one of the pieces.”
No doubt, smell affects motivation. Can it also affect the motivation to buy?
One company tested the effects of smell on business and found a
whopper of a result. Emitting the scent of chocolate from a vending
machine, it found, drove chocolate sales up 60 percent. The same company
installed a waffle-cone-smell emitter near a location-challenged
ice cream
shop: It was inside a large hotel and hard to find. Sales soared 50 percent,
leading the inventor to coin the term “aroma billboard” to describe the
technique.
Welcome to the world of sensory branding. Businesses are beginning to
pay attention to human sensory responses, with smell as the centerpiece.
For example, Starbucks does not allow employees to wear perfume on
company time because it interferes with the seductive smell of the coffee
they serve and its potential to attract customers.
Evidence for doing so comes from research by Dr.
Eric Spangenberg,
dean of the business school at Washington State University. Spangenberg
knew from prior work that the male nose responds positively to the smell of
rose maroc (spicy floral notes), the female nose to vanilla. What if he
pumped rose maroc into the air of the men’s section at a clothing store and
vanilla into the women’s section? Spangenberg hit pay dirt, generating
twice the sales throughout the store. What
if he then flipped the smells,
introducing the male-preferred odor to the female section and vice versa?
Spangenberg hit pay dirt again: Sales went down. “You can’t just use a
pleasant scent and expect it to work,” Spangenberg explained in an
interview with
Fast Company
. “It has to be congruent.”
Smell also can be used to differentiate a brand. Enter any Subway fast-
food restaurant blindfolded and you’d instantly know where you were. In
choosing a scent to represent your brand,
one newspaper article advises,
consider the aspirations of your potential buyer. Realtors sometimes employ
the smell of freshly baked bread or cookies during an open house to remind
buyers of the comforts of home, for example. Also match the odor to the
“personality” of the object for sale, the article suggests. For potential buyers
browsing an SUV dealership, the fresh scent of a forest or the salty odor of
a beach might evoke a sense of adventure more so than, say, the scent of
vanilla.
Research shows that the less complex the smell (the
fewer interacting
ingredients), the more likely it is to drive sales. Simpler smells drive sales
20 percent more than complex smells, or no smells at all.
Smells at work (not coming from the fridge)
I occasionally teach a molecular biology class for engineers, and I
decided to do my own little Proust experiment. (There was nothing rigorous
about this little parlor trick; it was simply an informal inquiry.) Every time I
taught a section on the enzyme RNA polymerase II, I prepped the room by
squirting the perfume Brut on one wall. In an identical class in another
building, I taught the same material, but
I did not squirt Brut when
describing the enzyme. Then I tested everybody, squirting the perfume into
both classrooms. Every time I did this experiment, I got the same result.
The students who were exposed to the perfume during learning did better
on subject matter pertaining to the enzyme—sometimes dramatically better
—than those who were not. And that led me to an idea. Many businesses
have a need to teach their clients about their products, from how to
implement software to how to repair engines. For financial reasons, the
classes are often compressed in time and packed with information—90
percent
of which is forgotten a
day
later. (For most declarative subjects,
memory degradation starts the first few hours after the teaching is finished.)
But what if you pair a smell with each lesson, as in my Brut experiment?
Teachers could do this for the class as a whole, or you could do it on your
own. You could spritz a bit of the scent near your pillow before you go to
sleep, too. Overnight, you could not help but associate the autobiographical
experience of the class—complete with the intense transfer of information
—with the scent. Back at your company, when you need to apply what you
learned, you could review your notes in the presence of the smell you
encountered during the learning. See if it improves your performance, even
cuts down on errors.
Is this context-dependent learning (remember those deep-sea divers
from the Memory chapter) or a true multisensory environment? Either way,
it’s a start toward thinking about learning environments that go beyond our
usual addiction to images and sounds.
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