MAM
Somdutta Singh weighs in on sensory marketing: How to create immersive consumer experiences
The human brain is a marvel and works in ways that scientists are still striving to fully understand. There has, however, been quite a bit of development around the concept of embodied cognition, which theorizes that our cognitive processes are deeply rooted in the body’s interactions with the world.
Marketing researchers understand the significance of this quite well and apply it to sensory marketing. Sensory marketing leverages this concept by targeting the five senses—sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch—to create deeper emotional connections with consumers.
The role of senses in marketing: Creating a multisensory experience
Rather than relying solely on visual and auditory elements, sensory marketing seeks to engage consumers through tactile sensations, taste perceptions, and olfactory experiences as well. This holistic approach aims to create a comprehensive brand experience that resonates deeply with the consumer. Here are how the five senses can be harnessed for marketing.
Visual appeal
Visual stimuli are the most common and impactful in marketing. Colors, images, videos, and design elements are meticulously chosen to evoke specific emotions and reactions. Visual storytelling through graphics and videos can evoke emotions, making marketing messages more memorable and persuasive.
Auditory stimuli
Auditory elements such as music, sound effects, and voice tones can significantly influence consumer behavior. Upbeat music can create a lively atmosphere, while soothing sounds can enhance a sense of calm and relaxation. Jingles are often the go to for brands when it comes to creating memorable auditory brand associations.
Smell
Olfactory stimuli can trigger memories and emotions more powerfully than any other sense. Scent marketing is very commonly used in retail settings, often involving strategically choosing and deploying fragrances to influence consumer behavior and enhance the overall shopping experience. A good example is the smell of incense that is often used in shops around India, especially garment shops. The scents associated with these incenses often invoke a sense of familiarity when visiting these stores.
Taste
Taste is particularly prominent in industries such as food and beverage where it directly influences consumer preferences and perceptions. But, it’s not limited to the quality of the food of beverages themselves. The sense of taste can also be intertwined with the other senses, making it a powerful tool in creating holistic sensory experiences. When combined with visual presentation, aroma, and even tactile sensations, taste can elevate the overall perception of a product or brand. Moreover, the memory associated with tastes can be used to sell products outside of the food and beverage industry. For instance, the use of familiar flavors or aromas in products like candles, cosmetics, or even cleaning supplies can evoke specific memories or emotions, enhancing the consumer’s experience and connection with the brand. This cross-industry application of taste leverages the strong link between flavor and memory, enabling brands to create compelling stories and sensory cues that resonate deeply with consumers.
Touch
Tactile experiences are crucial in creating a sense of connection with products. The way a product feels in the hand can convey its quality, durability, and craftsmanship. For instance, the smooth, luxurious texture of a high-end smartphone or the soft, plush fabric of a premium garment can evoke feelings of comfort and satisfaction. In retail environments, allowing customers to interact physically with products through touch can enhance their shopping experience and increase their likelihood of making a purchase. Beyond physical products, tactile sensations can also be integrated into digital interfaces and packaging design to simulate touch and provide a sensory-rich experience.
Strategies for sensory marketing for an e-commerce platform
With how things have been described so far, you might wonder how an online business can even make use of things like taste, touch, or smell. However, even in the digital realm of e-commerce, sensory marketing can be effectively employed to enhance customer engagement and satisfaction. These strategies might be helpful:
Olfactory and gustatory marketing
It might seem counterintuitive to think that something like smell and taste can be replicated using online marketing, but you will be surprised by how much your body remembers about the taste and smell of something through visuals alone. Use descriptive language and imagery that evoke scents or flavors associated with products. For example, describing the aroma of freshly brewed coffee or the taste of gourmet chocolates can appeal to the senses of smell and taste indirectly.
Tactile sensory marketing
Think of how the sense of touch can invoke certain feelings. The tactile experience of holding a product, feeling its texture, and assessing its weight can convey a sense of luxury, reliability, or comfort. In e-commerce, replicating this physical interaction is usually done though descriptions or with the help of imagery that can be associated with feelings of touch. If you look at smartphone marketing, you will often find images that emphasize on the shapes and textures on the phone, which can give viewers of the ads a good idea on how the phone will feel when in their hands.
Creating personal experiences using AR
Augmented Reality (AR) opens up a world of possibilities for businesses looking to engage consumers in innovative ways, transforming how products are visualized and experienced. It is becoming common nowadays for companies to allow users to virtually try on a product before buying. People are often drawn towards a 3D look, which is now possible due to AR technology. This immersive visual experience not only enhances the shopping experience by providing a more realistic preview but also increases confidence in purchasing decisions.
Innovative visual marketing for memorable experiences
People often think about products to buy when viewing them. This is also why visual media is important for marketing. However, in a world where short-form content takes precedence, people can often be overwhelmed with video content and forget about it. For example, watching a video of people wearing masks can remind you to look up Amazon for masks. Yet, this fleeting thought might quickly fade away amidst the barrage of other content. This is where innovative sensory marketing techniques can be useful. Samsung’s recent QR code advertisement in newspapers exemplifies the evolution of ad campaigns, highlighting their powerful image search feature in their new phones. By scanning the QR code with a phone, users can experience a demonstration where the Samsung pen allows them to visually interact with products in videos, triggering instant searches. This seamless integration not only reinforces the visual cue but also transforms a momentary thought into immediate action, enhancing the overall shopping experience.
Concluding thoughts
The evolving landscape of digital marketing and consumer behavior highlights the importance of leveraging sensory experiences to enhance engagement and drive action. It is also interesting to imagine how these sensory marketing techniques can further develop and integrate with emerging technologies. As we continue to innovate, the potential for creating deeply personalized and immersive shopping experiences will only expand, offering consumers a richer and more engaging way to explore and purchase products.
The article has been authored by first-generation serial entrepreneur, investor and ex-member Niti Aayog and Assiduus’ founder & CEO Dr Somdutta Singh.
Digital
GUEST COLUMN: How AI is restructuring distributor and retailer motivation models
From incentives to intelligence, AI is redefining how brands engage channel partners
MUMBAI: Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming how brands engage with their most critical yet often overlooked stakeholders: distributors, retailers, and last-mile influencers. For Abhinav Jain, co-founder and CEO of Almonds Ai, this shift marks a fundamental departure from traditional, transaction-led incentive models toward behaviour-driven, data-intelligent ecosystems. In this piece, Jain examines how AI is enabling brands to decode partner motivations, predict engagement patterns, and deliver personalised, scalable experiences—ultimately redefining channel relationships from transactional exchanges to long-term growth partnerships.
Across many sectors, there is increasing recognition that motivating those who bring products to market (distributors, retailers, last-mile influencers) poses a growing challenge.
Brands continue to invest significant marketing and digital resources to consumers, yet in many countries and the vast majority of emerging economies, these types of consumer-focused investment areas have had little impact on ultimate product delivery. Rather, it is still the case that traditional retail continues to make up most products sold.
So why is it that the systems built around motivating these channels have yet to evolve?
For decades, distributor and retailer engagement revolved around static schemes – quarterly targets, volume-based rewards, and occasional trade promotions. These programs were designed around transactions, not behaviour. The assumption was simple: if incentives increase, performance will follow.
Now, with the advent of artificial intelligence, the definition of performance is being challenged.
With the development of artificial intelligence, businesses can move beyond simply creating loyalty based on transactional-based models and toward models built on behaviours, the behaviours of channel partners that are intrinsic to their motivations in engaging with particular brands. As a result, the means by which businesses develop relationships within their distribution network are starting to evolve; thus, ultimately changing how brands interact with those within their distribution network.
Assessing engagement: Transitioning from transactional- to behavioural intelligence
Traditional loyalty systems refer to transactional activity (sales data). Although this data is valuable and important, it only provides a partial view of engagement across the channel partner.
For example, a retailer may have a high frequency of sales of a product, but their lack of engagement with the manufacturer would not reflect that they have true loyalty toward that brand. Conversely, a retailer who actively participates in training programmes, acts as brand advocates, and is engaged in learning with the supplier would exhibit more profound levels of loyalty but would have been invisible based on historical incentive programmes.
Artificial intelligence allows for the identification of behaviours that help to address this gap. Brands are able to use a variety of engagement data points, participate in learning programs, respond to communications, redeem behaviour and track platform use behaviour in order to identify motivation through behaviour.
McKinsey has stated that companies that leverage advanced analytics for their sales and distribution functions can achieve as much as a 15-20 per cent increase in productivity due to increased awareness of their behavioural trends throughout their networks.
This visibility of behavioural patterns within channel ecosystems can be transformational to brands as they can now view how partners engage on their path to purchasing products, instead of just measuring the sales revenue generated by those purchases.
Predicting motivations, not just measuring performance
Possibly, the largest contribution of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to helping brands engage with partners via channel ecosystems is its ability to predict future engagement versus simply measuring past performance.
Traditionally, brands only realised that a partner was disengaged (not likely to purchase products) once their sales performance had already declined. By then, the brand would have to use significant amounts of incentives or aggressive promotional activities to recovery their partner’s engagement level.
AI models can help organisations to detect early signs that a partner is becoming disengaged, such as declining participation in learning modules, declining interaction via the platform, or slower reward redemption rates. These indicators can help organisations to proactively engage with their partners before their sales performance begins to decline.
The practical application of AI and predictive analytics gives brands the ability to re-engage with their partners prior to their sales performance declines. For example, instead of developing and implementing broad-reaching incentive programs that provide a “one size fits all” incentive to all partners in an ecosystem, brands are able to develop targeted, engaging re-engagement programmes. This is how personalisation can be done on a large scale, such as across global distribution and retail networks.
The vast majority of distributor and retailer channels have thousands, if not millions, of individual channel partners. Historically, providing personalisation to such a large number of businesses has not been feasible.
However, with the advent of AI, personalisation at scale is becoming a reality.
Brands can now create tailored engagement journeys for all their partners, based on their partner profiles, through some combination of machine learning models and behavioural segmentation. For example, high-performing distributors might receive higher levels of leadership-based recognition and greater incentives to continue to grow. Emerging retailers, on the other hand, might be supported with training, onboarding rewards, and measurable performance milestones.
The shift towards personalisation of partner engagement echoes the direction that consumer marketing is already moving towards.
According to Salesforce’s report, over 70 per cent of customers expect personalisation in the way that brands engage with them. As such, there is a growing expectation for B2B ecosystems to have these same types of expectations from their channel partners.
Gamification and continuous engagement
AI is also radically changing how brands will engage with their channel partners through the use of gamification.
Many traditional incentive-based contests and leaderboards would spark temporary engagement among their participants, but they struggled to sustain engagement over time. With the use of AI, gamification mechanics are evolving dynamically based on historical and evolving participation patterns by their channel partners.
Challenges, rewards, and recognition structures can be modified continuously in order to sustain engagement with all of a brand’s partner segments. This will provide a greater opportunity to move away from episodic campaigns towards ongoing, continuous engagement experiences.
When channel partners receive motivation as part of their daily business activities through recognition, learning, and tracking their performance, long-term loyalty will be achieved.
Aligning motivation to broader impact
There is a growing trend within the channel ecosystem to integrate sustainability and socially responsible behaviours into the channel partner programmes of brands.
Increasingly, brands are motivating their partners to use sustainable practices in their operations, participate in sustainable practices like sustainability-related knowledge programmes, or promote products that are in line with their sustainability objectives.
Brands can use AI to monitor and measure these types of behaviours and incorporate them into their incentive frameworks so that brands can align their commercial objectives with broader social and environmental outcomes.
A shift in the way brands view their channel partners
AI is having the most significant impact on the way that brands are now viewing their channel partners, as it relates to the underlying philosophy of those fundamental relationships.
For the past several decades, many brands have viewed their channel partners as intermediaries in the supply chain. More and more brands are now beginning to view their channel partners as key ‘partners-in-growth,’ and their actions can have a direct impact on market performance.
In fact, all the channel ecosystems are using behavioural engagement platforms to design new models that reward not just transactional behaviour, but also create continuous engagement journeys for their partners, where their partners can receive recognition for their participation, learning, and continued engagement, thereby reinforcing long-term loyalty to the brand.
The future: Intelligent channel ecosystems
As we consider what the next phase of channel engagement may look like, many believe that it will be based on intelligent ecosystems, using AI to continuously monitor and adjust the engagement strategies used to engage their channel partners, in real time and based on the behaviours of those partners.
For brands operating in complex distribution networks, the ability to perform well will be determined both by whether products are available to their customers, as well as by the enthusiasm, expertise, and loyalty shown from each channel partner that represents the brand each and every day that they are working on behalf of the brand.
While AI clearly does not eliminate the human aspect of a brand’s relationship with its channel partners, it does allow brands to better understand and nurture that relationship.
In markets where the last mile will determine whether a sale is made, how one leverages the intelligence gained by using AI will ultimately be the difference between gaining a new, sustainable competitive advantage versus losing one.
