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Sound influences our perception of a product’s quality.

For instance, people judge potato chips to be fresher if you enhance their crispy sound.

Unaware that sound molds our perception of food and drinks, we actually eat with all our senses. You won’t feel the same way if your food looks awful on your plate or if the textures seem weird inside your mouth.

But when it comes to sound, we are even less conscious of how it affects our food experience.

And as marketers, we can use this to our advantage.

Unconscious appraisal with sound cues

Different cues help us determine the quality of a product.

How it looks, smells, and tastes will help us differentiate one item from another.

But do we use sound cues for product assessments?

New tennis balls make a completely different sound from old ones. Any tennis player will easily tell you the difference. A plumber will tell you the state of a pipe based on its sound. Musical instruments are mainly rated on their quality of sound.

But food and beverages?

We don’t usually use sound cues to assess their quality.

At least not consciously.

Researchers have found that people can assess the temperature of a beverage solely on the sound it does when poured into a recipient. We are capable of telling the difference, but it’s not something we use consciously.

We also judge brands’ names as more premium than others depending on the phonemes being used. And these assesments are based on how familiar these sound units are to us.

Phonemes help us distinguish one word from another (e.g. “t” and “d” in “bad” and “bat”) and are acquired at different phases of our development.

Phonemes like “m” (e.g. for mama) or “b” (e.g. for ball) are integrated earlier in life than phonemes like “sh” (e.g. shoe) or “th” (e.g. think).

Brand names that use phonemes acquired later in life, and that are less frequently used, are perceived as luxurious.

For instance, it’s not unusual for Drug companies to issue a name for their medicine starting with “x” or “z”. Product names derived from these letters are more likely to make them sound unique and special.

Even foreign brand names that don’t resemble the consumer’s mother tongue can be perceived as more premium as they’re seen as rarer phonemes and later acquired into our language structure.

We might not notice, but sound cues are essential to the consumer’s experience of a product.

Back to Beer

What auditory cues do we have with beer?

Mainly three: bottle opening sound, pouring sound, and the sound of foam/bubbles.

Product designers can influence people’s experience of their products by altering the sound cues involved in this process.

And there are certain sounds marketers should pay more attention to.

A series of studies carried last year show that there’re certain sound features highly related to the perception of premiumness. When 320 participants were asked to rate different premium attributes depending on the sounds they heard at that moment, researchers found some interesting results:

• Packaging: Bottle sounds are rated as more premium and liked more than can sounds.
• Drink interaction: Pouring sounds are preferred and are considered more premium than opening sounds (for both, cans and bottles).
• Volume: louder sounds are more liked and assessed as more premium than quieter sounds.

These key sound features drove participants to rate the beer as of higher quality, more authentic, more premium, more liked, and they were more likely to pay a higher price for that type of beer.

These findings can help marketers enhance sounds for ads and package designs in a way that will draw more of the intended target audience towards their brand.

The Takeaway

Packaging sounds can influence people’s perception of beer quality.

By changing certain audio cues, brands can enhance people’s drinking experience.

Do you want your beer to feel more alive, happy, and nice?

Work on how it sounds to your consumer.

Sensory marketing is a powerful tool.

Beer brands could change the packaging to meet certain consumer expectations. They can vary the form or material of the opening of bottles and cans to create sounds that will elicit the intended associations. Or they could enhance these auditory cues in beer ads and create more positive associations with the product.

The possibilities are endless.

But this time, don’t leave sound aside.

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