Articles: sensory marketing

Advertising is usually pictured as an image: colour, photograph, headline. In practice a customer takes a brand in through every sense at once and often remembers a feeling they cannot name. A heavy, textured business card says something different from a thin, smooth one, even with identical wording.

Four layers of the same message

They are best treated as parts of one story rather than separate ideas added on in turn.

• Sight - colour, lettering and layout, the part noticed first.
• Touch - textured paper, matt or Soft Touch film, the weight of a card in the hand.
• Scent - in the room, in the packaging, sometimes the smell of fresh print itself.
• Sound - background music matched to the place and the hour.
• Coherence - all of those layers should say the same thing, or the result jars.

Where to start

You do not have to introduce everything at once. Touch is the simplest place to begin, because it costs least to change: the same design on textured paper or with a matt film reads quite differently from a plain, smooth sheet. Sound in the room usually comes next, chosen around how long guests stay and why they came.

What matters most is agreement between the layers. If a brand talks about calm while fast music plays inside and everything is in strong colours, customers sense something false, even when they cannot point to what is wrong.