Multisensory Marketing: How to Create Multisensory Experiences in Advertising

Taking in the world with all our senses shapes how we perceive things and what we remember. Multisensory perception, the interplay of different senses, turns individual impressions into an experience. For your marketing, that means: the more senses you address in a coherent way, the more firmly your brand sticks. This article is part of our series 10 psychological effects in marketing.

What is multisensory perception?

Multisensory perception describes how the brain combines information from several senses into one overall impression: sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. Research on multisensory integration shows that matching stimuli from different senses can be more powerful than each stimulus on its own. When the senses contradict each other, however, the experience quickly feels wrong.

In evolution, this had a clear benefit: what you see, hear and smell at the same time, you recognise faster and more reliably.

Example: a steak in the pan

When you fry a steak, all the senses work together. The eyes judge the colour, the ears hear the sizzling, the nose smells the aroma, and in the end the sense of taste enjoys the result. This multisensory experience is more than the sum of its parts. And just reading this paragraph, you probably had some of it in your head.

Multisensory marketing

The challenge in digital marketing: screens only deliver image and sound. The other senses can still be reached, through memory.

1. Images you can smell and taste: close-ups, steam, droplets, textures. Visual content can evoke memories of smells and tastes.
2. Sound as an amplifier: crackling, hissing, pouring, the click of a lid. Sounds make materials and freshness tangible.
3. Motion and touch: hands running over fabric, opening a package, turning a product. This creates an impression of the sense of touch.
4. After the purchase: packaging as an experience. Colour, material, scent and the sound of unpacking intensify the emotions around opening and enrich the brand experience.

How we use multisensory marketing in ads

At ad.boutique, we plan sound and image together, not one after the other:

• Clear when muted, better with sound: many people watch videos in the feed without sound. Every creative therefore works with subtitles and images that suggest sounds. Anyone who turns the sound on gets the amplification.
• Original sound instead of stock music: the real sound of the product often beats interchangeable music. More on our production under Content Production.
• Close-ups in the hook: the first seconds show texture, motion or steam, not the logo.
• Checking coherence: colour, sound, music and copy tell the same story. Whether the version with original sound or with a voiceover performs better is decided by the creative test, as described in Ad creatives for Meta.

Limits

Multisensory marketing does not mean overloading all the senses at once. Too many stimuli that do not fit together are confusing. Choose the two or three sensory impressions that define your product best and use them consistently.