Sensory Marketing Theory: Why Touch, Taste and Smell Could Be Your Business’s Secret Weapon

Most marketing still lives in two dimensions; your average campaign reaches people through sight, maybe sound if there’s video. But human beings aren’t wired to remember in two dimensions. We experience the world and store those experiences through five senses.

That’s the core of Sensory Marketing Theory, a concept that should be on the radar of every brand strategist, marketer and anyone responsible for customer experience.

The Big Idea

Sensory Marketing is the intentional engagement of one or more of the five senses to influence how people perceive, remember and connect with your business. It's been studied extensively by Dr. Aradhna Krishna at the University of Michigan, who calls it the Science of engaging the senses to create more memorable brand experiences.

Here’s why it matters:

• The more senses you activate, the more areas of the brain get involved in encoding the experience.

• Multi-sensory encoding makes memories more durable and more emotionally charged.

• When you combine this with a relevant emotional context (a gift, a celebration, an event), the experience becomes almost impossible to forget.

The Neuroscience Behind Sensory Marketing

To understand why this works, you need to know how your brain processes sensory input:

• Sight is processed primarily in the occipital lobe. It’s the most common sensory channel in marketing (ads, logos, visuals). But vision alone can be easy to forget if it’s not reinforced.

  
  

• Touch is processed in the somatosensory cortex and linked closely to feelings of ownership and value. This is tied to the Endowment Effect, the phenomenon where people value something more once they’ve physically handled it.

• Smell is processed by the olfactory bulb, which has a direct line to the limbic system, the brain’s emotional and memory centre. This is why scent is such a powerful memory trigger.

• Taste activates both the gustatory cortex and importantly the same reward pathways as pleasurable experiences like music or laughter.

• Sound is processed in the temporal lobe and can anchor memories through rhythm, melody, and tone.

When more than one sense is engaged at the same time, the brain doesn’t just 'add up' the inputs, it integrates them into a single, richer memory trace, which is easier to retrieve later.

The Data That Proves It Works

• 81% of consumers say that being able to touch and feel a product increases their confidence in the purchase.

  (Invesp, 2023)

  
  

• Brand recall improves by up to 30% when more than one sense is engaged.

  (Millward Brown study)

  
  

• Scent marketing can increase dwell time in retail spaces by up to 20% and boost spending by 10–15%.

  (Journal of Retailing, 2014)

  
  

• Gifts including food, combining taste and smell, produce the strongest positive emotional responses of any gift category.

  (Knott & Thoma, 2020)

Why Most Marketing Fails the Sensory Test

Digital ads, email campaigns and even events often engage only one sense.

A Facebook ad? Sight only.

A podcast pre-roll? Sound only.

The problem is these experiences are competing with thousands of other sensory inputs every day and hence they rarely stick. By contrast, a well-crafted physical business touchpoint: think a premium product, a beautifully packaged gift, or an interactive event installation, engages multiple senses at once. And when tied to a relevant emotional context, it burns your business into memory.

Practical Applications for Brands

1. Product Packaging

   Apple’s box design isn’t an accident. The slow, air-cushioned unbox engages touch, sight, and sound, making the experience ceremonial.

   
   

2. Event Activations

   A pop-up coffee bar giving away branded coffee gift sets at your stand; engages smell, taste, touch, and sight - instantly more memorable than a free pen.

   
   

3. Corporate Gifting

   A gift that can be touched, smelled and used (e.g. a gift including luxury candle with a custom scent) becomes a multi-sensory anchor for your brand.

   
   

4. Retail Environments

   Lush Cosmetics combines scent, colour, and texture from the moment you walk in. Even if you leave without buying, you remember.

   
   

The ROI of Multi-Sensory Marketing

Multi-sensory campaigns aren’t just about looking nice, instead they:

• Increase recall → Customers think of you first when a need arises.

• Strengthen emotional bonds → Positive sensory experiences create positive brand associations.

• Boost conversion rates → When people can see, touch and smell a product, they feel more confident in buying.

• Extend brand longevity → A sensory cue (smell, texture, sound) can trigger memories years later.

The Takeaway

If you want your marketing to be remembered, you have to move beyond screens. Sensory Marketing Theory tells us that the brands who win are the ones who create multi-sensory, emotionally charged moments. Whether it’s a gift, a retail experience, or an event, the more senses you engage, the more you hardwire your business into your audience’s brain.

In other words: Don’t just be seen. Be felt, heard, tasted and remembered.