Visa’s Sensory Branding Goes Global

Today (June 17) Visa is announcing that their sensory branding suite is in over two dozen countries care of a dozen new partnerships.

Visa’s sensory branding suite of products includes a sound, animation and haptic cues for consumers and merchants when a Visa transaction is completed.  The tools were designed to provide customers with a transparent and clear mechanism to understand the progress of their transactions whether those transactions happen physically, via voice command, by a networked appliance or in an unattended retail context.

Visa is presently the only card brand providing a multiple sensory experience as part of their transactions mechanics.

“As consumers continue to change where and how they pay in the world, the entirety of the customer experience must also evolve in ways that have trust built-in from the start,” said Lynne Biggar, chief marketing and communications officer at Visa. “Giving greater dimensionality to our brand and letting our customers see, hear or feel Visa when they pay is an essential ingredient.”

To push the reach and range of the sensory suite, Visa has been forming partnerships worldwide to see its sensory branding more fully deployed.  Some of those partnerships include: the Carousell marketplace app in Singapore, 11 issuer mobile wallet apps throughout the Latin America region, stadiums across France at the FIFA Women’s World Cup, Aurus, Equinox Payments and Ziosk tableside ordering tablets in casual dining restaurants such as Chili’s, Outback Steakhouse and Olive Garden.

Early research on the sensory suite also indicates that thus far it is popular with consumers.  Studies done on San Francisco’s consumers indicated that consumers who experienced sensory branding were 12 percent more likely to say that the merchant cares for their security. Similarly, positive perceptions of the Visa brand increased by 14 percent compared with those who did not experience the sensory branding at the POS.

“Sensory branding cues provide a way for us to express that our brand promise of speed, security, reliability and trust is still behind every transaction,” Beggar noted.