Boxed Experiences
Sensory Pairings For Every Situation
Last week I caught wind of a new initiative from Lurpak Butter that teams them up with Last.FM to create recipe-based playlists:
FoodBeats will recommend you music based on the recipe you’re using, so, for example, if you’re making the (very British) sausage and mash, you would get ’90s Britpop.
Already a fan of their early food porn spots, I love how Lurpak has evolved their food coupling strategy to pairing flavors with sounds. Lately I’ve been thinking a bit about multi-sensory pairings, so this is a nice example of a brand experimenting in this space.
Lurpak is hardly the first to group to connect mood and food. Turntable Kitchen has been helping soundtrack suppers for several years now. Recently they released their Pairings Box offering – “a curated food and music discovery experience, delivered to your door.” A Pairings Box subscription gets you a hand-assembled dinner kit every month, including a limited edition 7 inch single, a digital mix-tape, a collection of dried ingredients, recipe notes, as well as other one-off treats. It’s music for your tastebuds and flavor for your ears.
When I think about the Pairings Box, what gets me excited is the opportunity to apply this ‘boxed experience’ approach to other senses and scenarios. You could have a lot of fun compiling a list of multi-sensory goodies that are just right for a specific occasion or scenario (i.e. your ideal First Date). Or, you could start with an object of interest and assemble a kit of complimentary items that would best serve to enhance the enjoyment of that object. Whether starting with a piece of art, product or service, it’s fascinating to contemplate the ideal mix of complimentary sounds, sights, scents, tastes & textures for a specific moment in time.
Experience Kits: The New (Un-Lame) Gift Baskets?
A while back I wrote a post asserting that Pinterest was essentially “what’s in my bag” on steroids. But where this latest line of thinking takes me is somewhere closer to “what’s in my night”. Imagine for a second, that Pinterest was used to collect items to stage or enhance everyday occasions or events. Imagine I could follow your various boards, like Cozy Night In, Bachelor Blow-Out, or Brunch With The ln-Laws. Now imagine that at the click of the button I could order the items on your board to my door, for whatever the compiled price of those items (plus a little kickback for your curation skills perhaps). Not only am I getting an experience in a box, I’m getting a collection of souvenirs to recall that occasion and to potentially re-pair for later occasions.
This is just one of several experience-based marketing scenarios I could see taking shape over the next few years. Whereas sensory staging used to be the specialty of event and activation planners, today more than ever I see the rest of us also looking for ways to be thoughtful about our surroundings (i.e. the art of the Dinner Party). Brands that can think about experience beyond their direct product use are poised to win. Whether it’s playing a role as a source of multi-sensory suggestions, serving as a pairing partner or acting as a larger experience agent, huge opportunities exist to help people live out new sensations in tangible ways.
HER NATURE HIS NURTURE 