SensoGram 23: The Bliss Point Factor ... Now and Always   When Nielsen released figures on the top 10 supermarket brands late last year, nutritionists reacted with dismay.  Soft drink, coffee and cigarettes accounted for seven of the top 10 brands, and these are not `nutritional' products at all!     In fact, the figures serve to demonstrate the main reason that consumers buy products: for sensory satisfaction!  With food, nutrition comes as a by-product of eating what we like to eat; and of course there are many other products (eg cigarettes) for which nutrition does not enter into the equation at all.  Even more compelling is the realisation that advertising and promotion are not essential.  The advertising of cigarettes in the electronic media has been outlawed now for nearly 20 years.   There are three key elements to the delivery of sensory satisfaction:    (1)        Sensory pleasure.  To be successful, a product must provide real sensory pleasure and be enjoyable to use.  It must be more than just `satisfactory' or `reasonably good'; it takes a bliss point experience to guarantee repeat purchase.   (2)        Consistency.  The product must consistently deliver at every usage occasion, not be great the first time then mediocre or poor the next.  With modern processing and QA methods, lack of consistency is not so much of an issue these days.  But it is still a considerable handicap in the marketing of unprocessed products such as fresh fruit, vegetables and meat.   (3)        Availability.  Distribution is important.  The best product in the world cannot succeed if it is not freely available.    If a product fails, more than likely it is not delivering on one or more of these three key elements.  The most difficult to attain is element (1), but this has the biggest payoff when you get it right.   The consumer quest for sensory pleasure is sometimes held to be a recent phenomenon which came with the advent of fast food.  Not so!  It is as old as humankind itself.  History shows us that the drive for pleasurable sensory experience has always been a potent motivator of human behaviour; indeed, the desire for exotic spices stimulated much of the early world exploration.    What is a recent phenomenon is our ability to measure sensory satisfaction, precisely, just as we might measure the length of a piece of string.  This gives us direct access to what is going on inside the consumer's head, the key to prediciting market success.