As agencies sniff out scent specialisms, is poly-sensory branding here to stay?

One agency starting to take touch seriously already is experiential shop Amplify’s Futures innovation lab, headed up by Ed Hallam. That experiential agencies are investing in prototyping and innovation – often quite heavily – indicates that poly-sensory work is becoming a key site of differentiation for experiential agencies: those who are best able to display capabilities across all five senses will be most able to capture major brand budgets.

Hallam’s team has developed a series of haptic prototypes responding to the question, “How can you bring someone into an emotion rather than telling them the emotion you want them to feel?” One device uses AI to ‘understand’ a user’s emotions from speech, translates those into specific haptic cues, and stores them so that a user can remember physical manifestations of those emotions. Another prototype is a piece of music specifically engineered to bring about goosebumps in all listeners. “How can you physically make someone feel something? That’s a really interesting space for brands to play in,” says Hallam.

For marketers, Hallam says, the focus has to be on “being the driving force of what’s possible in spaces and not just being reliant on things that are available off-the-shelf… I don’t even think it’s about trying to find the next frontier of what the sense experience is, but just always looking at all fronts of how we can push the brand into the next level of deep and meaningful relationship with the consumer. How do you make something stick in someone’s mind for days, weeks or years to come? Tapping into the innate human factors of our senses: that is the key.”

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