Scientific reflection
The article written by Von Wallpach and Kreuzer (2013) is about the multi-sensory sculpting methods (MSS) which during a brand experience it stimulates the human senses. This could be a movement a feeling, a smell or something heard.
The MSS comes from other two previous theories of brand experience. The idea behind multi-sensory sculpting is to let the consumers transform their own image of the brand into multi-sensory images. This helps the consumers to re-experience the brand and to remember the image and the feelings that the brand communicates to them and also to experience the brand again introspectively. What is going to be produced are multi-sensory sculptures made of different materials that are present in the toolkit of each participant. The result, as already said, is the transformation of the own image of the brand into metaphors in form of a sculpture (Von Wallpach & Kreuzer, 2013).
In my opinion, multi-sensory sculpting can be not also being applicated to brands of consumer goods, but also in the tourism field. But, instead of representing a brand with consumer goods the aim of MSS in tourism applications is to represent the experiences that the tourist lived while visiting a certain destination. My personal suggestion for the application in tourism is to add to the MSS toolkit typical objects and material that mainly belongs to the destination. For example, in an alpine destination, it would fit very well to add some woods or pieces of plants like pine in order also to evocate the smell of the touristic experience to the guest. Or for the maritime destinations, it could be sand or beach stones for instance.
In order to stimulate the tourist memories and feelings of the destination or in particular, of a specific experience, such as a particular trail, it could be useful to play background music reminiscent of the sounds of nature such as the water of streams or the moving leaves of trees or singing birds. Another sensory tool for tourism could be to have a certain smell in the room, such as wood or pine, to help the tourist to feel more creative and to let the tourist feel in a comfortable environment. This could help to stimulate the creativity to create the sculpture because behind a tourist destination there are mainly personal experiences and perceptions and intangible feelings.
Thus, the major limitations of the paper could not be excluded, but they must be analyzed in order to understand deeply the activity of multi-sensory sculpting and the possible applications in tourism.
From what I learned from the paper there are some limitations in general of this model. One of those is that MSS is labor, time, and cost intensive as you need a place where to take place the projects and some specialists that can translate with the volunteers the sculpture into inputs and useful information for the brand. Another point of reflection of the MSS is the toolkit for the sculpture. This, in fact, has to be provided with a large scale of materials in order to be optimized for everyone and to have all the materials that fit everyone´s sculpture. It is not easy to find the right materials for everyone to represent one specific brand that are going to be chosen from all the participants.
Talking about the applications of MSS in tourism could vary and it is a big opportunity to see how people imagine a tourist destination. On the other hand this kind of activity, in my opinion, is more related to a tangible product instead of a service or an experience. In consumer goods there is a clear definition of the brand, that´s why applicants can clearly describe it in a sculpture. In tourism, in the contrary, there is no clear brand because every destination distinguishes itself from nature from all the others. This could make the MSS for the participants quite hard, and for the data analysis in the end, as well.
References:
Von Wallpach, S., & Kreuzer, M. (2013). Multi-sensory Sculpting (MSS): Eliciting Embodied Brand Knowledge via Multi-sensory Metaphors. Journal of Business Research, 66 (9),1325- 1331. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2012.02.032