Designing the process of increasing the sales and market share of dairy companies based on the sensory marketing model

Introduction: The purpose of this research is to design a process for increasing the sales and market share of dairy companies based on the sensory marketing model. The competition in the dairy industry is high, and the industry uses different methods to strive for bigger market shares. In a globalizing world, increasingly competitive environment impels the companies to search for different marketing methods beside the traditional ones. Sensory marketing which is one of the comprising methods is a technique that aims to seduce the consumer by using his senses and influencing his feelings and behavior. In sensory marketing, with various stimuli that are sent to the five senses, consumer's emotional and behavioral orientations are studied to be affected. Sensory marketing is a useful because it gives companies a real opportunity to maximize product profitability . In today’s research, sensory stimuli, or sensory inputs, are addressed in connection with a place, a brand, or an environment where a service is offered and how it looks, sounds, smells, feels, and tastes influences consumers. It may relate to the impact on both consumers’ product evaluation and choice of a product or as consumers’ affections, cognitions, and actual behaviors regarding, for example, how much time is spent in a store or how much money is spent on the purchase of a certain brand. The starting point in this research is to first understand how businesses, using the five senses, develop sensory experiences for consumers based on various sensory strategies and sensory stimuli. The role of sensory experiences in judgment and decision making has raised a surge of interest in marketing as well as psychology. In marketing, scattered research on the role of the senses in consumer behavior has been brought together under the rubric of sensory marketing, that is, “marketing that engages the consumers' senses and affects their perception, judgment, and behavior”. Over the past few years, research in sensory marketing has expanded and spread on a global scale in a most significant way. From previously unknown topics at large annual scientific marketing conferences, such as the European Marketing Academy (EMAC), the Academy of Marketing Science, and the American Marketing Association (AMA), sensory marketing has come to be recognized as an independent, scientific research area, compared with areas such as advertising, relationship marketing, or branding. Many researchers believe that sensory marketing will become more significant in the future and will establish itself as an important area for both academics and practitioners.
Methodology: This study is developmental in terms of purpose.  It is conducted through the Grounded Theory. The research is a case study, and the statistical population includes two groups of experts, academics and industry experts. The sampling is done by the snowball method. The data collection tool is interviews. By the use of a qualitative approach based on the Grounded Theory, the factors affecting sensory marketing are identified, and an appropriate model is designed.
Results and Discussion: The final model of the research was formed with six main categories including intervening conditions (i.e., type of company-customer interaction, brand awareness, word-of-mouth advertising), contextual conditions (economic and social-cultural factors), causal conditions (organizational factors, customer and competitive environment), pivotal phenomenon (taste, olfactory, visual, auditory and tactile marketing), strategies (brand satisfaction and experience and perceived individual value) and outcomes (financial, competitive and branding outcomes). There were also micro-categories and indicators to consider in the dairy industry.
Conclusion: In order to see the responses of consumers to sensory marketing practices, according to the research conducted on the dairy industry, it is observed that organizational, customer, and competitive factors affect sensory marketing. The implications of sensory marketing include financial, competitive and branding implications. Sensory marketing is regarded as a new way of making an organizational profit. More and more manufacturers in the dairy products apply scent, sound, texture, vision and taste as stimuli to build stronger emotional connections with the customer and drive preference to their brand. The results showed the powerful and tremendous effect of the concept of sensory marketing which is inevitable for the success of a firm in this highly competitive market. This study provides practical and theoretical implications in the dairy industry, which can help marketers in the industry to excel. The contributions of this study include not only bridging the aforementioned gap in the literature but also offering significant managerial implications.