By late 2020, I had the opportunity to collaborate with Mccan and Café de Colombia, in order to produce an international campaign to promote the Juan Valdez brand in an innovative way. Here, they wanted to foment the consumption of Colombian coffee to young generations from developed countries, such as the USA, Korea, and Norway. For this, a song was created with multisensory perception in mind. It was a cool collaboration! I hope more brands are thinking about the idea of engaging their consumers through all of the senses.  Here video of campaign, and some social media. Also, here some local and international press repercussion.

During the first semester of 2020, several projects are being delayed due to the COVID-19 situation.

For now, happy to share that our 2019 collaboration in Asia allowed us to win the "7th knowledge Innovation Award Grand Prix", promoted by Knowledge Capital ! Very, very thankful for the opportunity.

A cool collaboration that also started recently is a quarterly column dedicated to discuss science in marketing at P&M mag. The content will be co-produced with colleagues at Uniandes.

​For the moment, cooking R&D ideas from home... also happy for being invited to teach virtual courses in consumer behavior and sensory marketing as guest scholar in  a couple of MsC European programs. 

 During June & July, 2019, I gathered some data - and spoke about my research - around Korea and Japan.
In Korea, my experiments were conducted as part of the ISEA 2019 & ACT Festival 2019. ACT's this year's topic was Food Hack! Here VIDEO 1 and VIDEO 2 showcases of festival.
In Japan, I conducted my experiments as a one-week science workshop at the Miraikan Museum. I would like to thank my colleagues from the Cyber Interface Lab for facilitating this journey (especially Prof. Takuji Narumi), as well as all the crew involved in this production process (including the colleagues from ACC and Knowledge Capital).
​

​

In 2018, I started to collaborate with Jagermeister during the design, production, and implementation of a new marketing campaign : Jagermeister Taste Remastered, Here, we created 4 sound cues to enhance the tasting experience of this worldwide famous liquor. The idea is that Jagermeister consumers can experience this multisensory journey by themselves via the campaign's website, while sharing their experiences through social networks. The production of the music was made in collaboration with Sam Shure, an upcoming German DJ based in Berlin. The concept was co-created with AKQA/Berlin, and the campaign was managed by the global-marketing crew of Jagermeister. We complemented the launching strategy of the campaign by offering in-situ multisensory tasting demonstrations to local influencers. The organization of these events is being coordinated with local/regional Jagermeister distributors. We started with a successful pilot  conducted in Berlin around November 2018, followed by 5 events in eastern-European capitals during April, 2019 (below some pics). I intend to use the music produced for this campaign to run a robust scientific experiment, in order to further validate how this music is enhancing Jagermeister's tasting experience. I was honoured with opportunity to put my R&D work into practice in collaboration with such an important and innovative brand -> PROST!

During the 24th April, 2019, I will be sharing with practitioners from advertising as a speaker at the IABDay. The topic of this year's conference is on how to build brands during the economics "abundance".

I was honoured by the invitation since IAB is as well-known worldwide institution that helps directing the standards of the online advertising industry. 
​

At KU Leuven, we are designing intelligent solutions in order to
retrieve music 
 that enhances the tasting experience of food and beverages.

We also organise and conduct sophisticated multisensory tasting events, as a showcase for discussing and engaging different stakeholders towards
the potential value of these ideas.

Check the video of our latest event, where we had important stakeholders from Belgium as our guests.

During 2018 I collaborated with a German brand, and they will soon launch a new multisensory tasting experience. In the meanwhile, it is always nice to remember previous successful collaborations with the public and private sectors : The Sound of Chocolate , a new way of experiencing Belgian chocolate, through music.

What we hear affects the perception of what we taste, no matter whether we realize it or not. Both music and ambient soundscapes have been shown to bias what we choose to buy/order in shops and restaurants/cafes (Biswas, Lund, & Szocs, 2018; Zellner, Geller, Lyons, Pyper, & Riaz,2017), typically without us realizing it. Meanwhile, a separate literature has developed over the last decade on the topic of ‘sonic seasoning.’ This is where music is especially chosen, or composed, in order to correspond crossmodal with the taste / aroma / mouthfeel / flavour (Crisinel el al., 2012; Reinoso Carvalho et al., 2015; Wang & Spence, 2016). Interesting questions here concern where such surprising correspondences come from, and elucidating the conditions under which corresponding vs incongruent (or no music) do, versus do not influence the tasting experience and eating behaviours (e.g., Hauck & Hecht, in press; Höchenberger & Ohla, in press; Lowe, Ringler, & Haws; 2018, Watson & Gunter, 2017), and the neural consequences/underpinnings of such almost-synaesthetic crossmodal interactions (Callan, Callan, & Ando, 2018). A branch of this literature has also examined ‘sensation transference’ effects – addressing questions such as ‘If you like the music more, do you like what you are eating/drinking more too?’ (Kantono et al., 2015, 2016). Auditory inputs that influence the perception of what we taste are not limited to environmental sounds. They also involve the sounds that derived from what we eat such as slurping, crunching, or smacking as well as speech sounds that we use to refer to specific foods (see Spence, 2015, for a review).
When what we hear becomes too loud, it is usually regarded as noise. The research shows that loud background noise, be it airplane noise, white noise, or restaurant noise, can affect both the taste of food and drink, as well as people’s ability to discriminate various aspects of their tasting experience (see Spence, 2014, for a review). Given the increasing noise levels in many restaurants and bars these days, there may even be a public health angle to this research. Finally, given the growing literature on music and soundscape’s influence on the multisensory tasting experience, there is a growing interest in using technology to synchronize auditory stimulation with the tasting experience (see Spence, 2019, for a review). This is a rich area for creative practice (see also The Chocolate Symphony at this year’s IMRF meeting) and submissions are also welcomed in this area, providing they connect to the multisensory science.
Hence, despite its inauspicious beginnings 70 years ago (see Pettit, 1958), research on auditory contributions to food perception and behaviour has exploded in recent years, with interest coming from the fields of cognitive neuroscience, marketing, food science, design, branding, public health and beyond. As such, now would seem like an excellent time to capture the growing interest and excitement in this area with a Special Issue dedicated to the topic.

Lucky me that I have the chance to present my work in Latin America! Here there are 3 events where I will participate (a couple of them may be happening as multisensory tasting demonstrations). First, CERALE 2018, where it will be inaugurated the new campus of Universidad de los Andes, in Cartagena de Indias (end of May). Second, a presentation at the 4th International Congress of Marketing, organised by UDLA, to be happening by the end of June, in Quito, Ecuador. The third event is Investigaction 2018, happening in Bogotá and Medellin, and organised by ACEI (Colombian Association of Market research companies) during August.