SONIC SWEETNER

Scientists have tried to correlate the connection between listening to music and taste perception. Apparently, listening to a certain kind of music while eating/drinking may have an effect on the way your food/drink tastes to you - for example: High pitched musical notes make people perceive food as sweeter. 

Shanghai's Xin Cafe recently put this to test in their campaign that was aimed at reducing sugar consumption among the Chinese people. Customers would plug their headphones at the base of their coffee cup which has an embedded soundtrack and listen to it as they sipped their drink. About 63% said their drinks tasted sweeter.

 The increasing rates of obesity in China, thanks to western-style fast foods and sugar based drinks has inspired Xin Cafe to come up with this campaign with the help of their marketing agency - Beijing Dentsu. 

The campaign was mainly targeted at Xin Cafe's customers - Xin Cafe is positioned as a creative workspace and as a result, it made sense to come up with a creative idea in order to make people more aware/conscious about overconsumption of sugar. The creativity, appeal and engagement of the campaign has garnered a lot of attention, and it's message has extended itself beyond Xin Cafe's customers making the campaign a success!

In terms of weakness, the only one I can think of is that people perceive music very differently - therefore, I am unsure how much of a difference this might make in regard to overconsumption of sugar. Although 63% is a fairly good statistic to show that a difference was noticeable, I find it difficult to imagine a world where we would have to plug in a pair of headphones every time we drink coffee for example, in order to consume less sugar. What if I want to listen to some jazz while I drink my coffee instead of high pitched noises? 

Regardless, this was a very interesting marketing piece and something that I would be very interested in participating to see the difference for myself!

To see if it works for you, find the soundtrack here: http://xincafe.cn/sonicsweetener/en/