Making Whisky Tours Unforgettable
As whisky enthusiasts in the modern era, we seek more than simply a brand in premium packaging. We seek authentic, engaging, and personalised experiences. Hence, distilleries have a unique opportunity to captivate their guests in memorable and meaningful ways. But with the rise of new distilleries and advanced visitor centres, a problem arises.
No longer is the standard ‘tour, taste, shop’ formula enough for guests when every other distillery is offering much the same. To differentiate and stay memorable, we must look beyond the obvious and lean into the neuroscience of experience – specifically – novelty, emotion, and sensory engagement.
Why Stand Out?
In 2022, there were 2 million visits to scotch whisky distilleries alone, making scotch whisky visitor centres the most popular tourist attraction in Scotland as a category. Once we add the ~70 scotch whisky visitor centres to those of Ireland, England, and Wales, we have over 100 options for the budding, mildly curious, or reluctant whisky tourist.
Distillery tours are a vital growth channel for whisky brands. They’re more than marketing tools, they’re experiential platforms that convert interest into immersive brand advocacy. But if your brand struggles to differentiate itself from any of the others, where is the opportunity for brand loyalty?
It all comes down to the neuroscience of how we each make decisions. However, in a real world neural processing scenario, mapping such decisions becomes rapidly complex. Plugging someone into an fMRI machine as they stroll through the supermarket aisles presents significant challenges. But for whisky distilleries, a great deal can be borrowed from the study of novelty in tourism.
A Novel Idea For Whisky Visitor Centres
A 2020 study published in Frontiers in Psychology - “The Experience of Novelty and the Novelty of Experience” - explored how theory from cognitive psychology can be utilised to provide a more nuanced understanding of the tourism experience. It offers a powerful insight: novelty is the key to memory. Researchers Skavronskaya, Moyle, and Scott found that the most memorable travel experiences are not necessarily the most luxurious or polished, but the ones that are emotionally intense, surprising, and personally meaningful.
Novelty in tourism leads to both immediate and long-term effects. In the short term, novel experiences trigger heightened emotions and focused attention, making them more likely to be encoded into long-term memory. This is supported by neuroscience research showing that novelty enhances attention and memory storage, especially when experiences are emotionally engaging and goal-relevant.
Over time, these novel experiences become more memorable and easier to recall, often forming the core of what travellers remember about a trip. Novelty acts as a powerful cognitive and emotional amplifier in tourism - deepening memory, heightening emotion, and shaping how experiences are evaluated and remembered.
The study’s takeaway is simple but profound: people remember what’s new, unexpected, and emotionally charged. And not just because it’s ‘fun’. Novel experiences are encoded more deeply into memory, thanks to the way our brains react to surprise and emotional arousal. Even negative experiences (like missed flights or lost luggage) are often recalled fondly if they were novel and meaningful.
What does that mean for distilleries?
It means a cookie-cutter tour that ends in a quick dram and a discount voucher just won’t cut it anymore. A tour that sticks in the guests’ memories needs to stir them, challenge their assumptions, and create moments that linger long after the glass is empty. Guests need more than just production facts, cows inebriated on draff, and a monologue on how pure the water is — they need something unique and surprising.
Sensory Education: The Distillery’s Secret Weapon
This is where psychophysics becomes a game-changer. Far from being niche or academic, psychophysics taps into the very same emotional and cognitive processes described in the study.
When guests are invited to smell, touch, taste, compare, and decode, they’re no longer passive observers. They become participants in their own discovery – their own story in fact - and that shift from passive to active is where memory magic happens.
Imagine how these alternative ideas would stick to your memory:
A kaleidoscope of flavour – colour the tasting drams with bright food colouring – green, purple, red etc – to emphasis how powerful vision is for influencing flavour perception and how the brain searches for flavour congruencies that meet expectations.
Tactile stimulation – coat the tasting glasses with different textures such as rough, silky, tacky, to highlight the importance of mouthfeel in whisky.
Genetic variability – use PROP test strips to show guests how we all taste the same things differently, and why there are no wrong answers when it comes to describing whisky.
Give guests an empty glass – an empty glass can demonstrate that there is in fact no flavour in the glass – empty or full – flavour is created inside the mind.
All of these suggestions go beyond the product; they give your guests a story to tell. A story that becomes social currency, and therefore, the most powerful marketing tool available.
Furthermore, ideas such as these disrupt the guests’ expectations. They create a novel experience that causes them to stop and think – like if you saw a purple orange on the supermarket shelves. It becomes something to remember, perhaps each time they pick up a whisky glass.
A New Benchmark for Distillery Experiences
In short, novelty is a tool for mapping the distillery tour to emotionally charged memories. And sensory education offers the most direct, impactful way to deliver it.
Distillery visitor centres that embrace this approach won’t just stand out, they’ll stand apart. Just one key takeaway for the guests can make a world of difference if it is delivered in just the right why. Consider what has stood out to you during a tour. It may be the smallest thing, but the one you remember the most.
Get in touch to see how we can work together and create something truly memorable, surprising, and of course, novel, for your distillery tour.