Inc Magazine: You Can’t Touch Products Online. Here’s How Top Brands Are Still Making Customers ‘Feel’ Them

Offline, shopping is usually a full sensory experience. You feel the fabric of new clothing when you try it on. Going to a shopping center can be as much about the smells of a nearby Cinnabon or perfume counter as it is about the actual stores. And even when cookies in a store are in-package, there are opportunities to pick it up, shake it, squeeze it, and get some sense of what you’re about to buy. If you’re lucky, there might even be tester samples available so you can taste those cookies for yourself.

Online, things get a lot more difficult, so brands typically opt to lean heavily into pretty visuals and hope that’s enough. And a lot of times, it is. But as technology increasingly makes it easier to produce professional-looking visuals, merely attractive photos and video will be the norm.

Brands need to get more creatively strategic. That means getting inventive when it comes to translating all senses through the visuals, projecting some feeling of what it would be like to bite into a cookie, rub lotion onto your skin, or feel the warmth of a sweater. These types of sensory shopping experiences earn loyalty when discounts alone aren’t enough. In fact, recent studies suggest that while 65 percent of consumers shop online for price and convenience, 37 percent cite “enhanced product content” as the reason they actually make a deeper investment.

Lowering prices is a well-worn commodity play. But building sensory DTC experiences is a brand play, built on the feeling the product provides. And as the world becomes increasingly digital, it will be those that can signal the full experience of their product, tapping into a richer emotional connection, that will stand out among the rest.

A sensory slight of hand

It’s obviously impossible to replicate the full sensory experiences that come with physically interacting with products. But it’s essential to give consumers some taste of the product experience that goes beyond the look of its packaging. Beauty, CPG and wellness brands in particular are heavily reliant on the senses to drive purchasing decisions—from the pleasing crunch of a snack to the chalky feel of a poor-quality supplement. But even more broadly, reports show that 88 percent of global shoppers expect brands to engage multiple senses to earn their trust.

Because of this, “visual proxies” have become the new gold standard. Brands can no longer just show a “hero shot” of a product; they have to do things like use macro photography to show the salt crystals on a chip or the “dew” on a cold bottle. These tactics use sight to trick the brain into feeling and smelling the product in a digital setting, embodying the full product experience.

It’s the reason why, when olive oil started to trend in squeeze bottles, all brands began to show their bottles being…squeezed, so that the brand images triggered the brain’s touch-center. Elsewhere, exaggerated “delicious photography” became standard, emphasizing a product’s crispy, gooey, aromatic, or bright qualities.

Even in a digital setting, consumers want to interact with it as if it were actually there. But doing this successfully often means layering a few complementary sensory strategies.

1. Go beyond lifestyle visuals

It’s not enough to put your product in a visually pleasing setting and assume people will be drawn to it. Instead, replace generic lifestyle shots with “texture-first” videos. Show the crumbs, the fizz, or the fabric weave in extreme detail—like cookie brand Last Crumb, which uses macro-photography that makes you feel the “pull” of the dough. Mocktail brand Ghia achieves something similar by using vibrant, grainy textures and “bitter-cued” color palettes that evoke the sophisticated taste of an aperitif.

2. Own your sound

While you can’t count on a customer’s digital device audio being turned on, there’s still value in creating ASMR-style soundscapes in the background of product videos. Think of audio as a frontier for branding—where the subtle clink of ice falling into a glass can drive summer sales and the sound of a bag opening can signal “freshness”. As masters of ASMR marketing, Glossier’s video content focuses on the squish of a serum or the click of a cap, earning a 30 percent higher CTR than standard beauty ads.

3. Get descriptive

It’s crucial to write sensory product descriptions that move on from functional adjectives like “delicious” to visceral ones like “brittle,” “velvety,” and “cooling”. Flamingo Estate calls this approach “olfactory storytelling”—making their site language so overwhelmingly descriptive of “wet earth” and “crushed tomatoes” that you can practically smell it.

4. Add a touch of feedback

Just because you can’t touch online products doesn’t mean you can’t build tactile sensations into digital brand experiences. Brands too often forget that modern digital devices come enabled with plenty of haptic capabilities—allowing various touch commands to be paired with vibrations or other tactile cues. At minimum, triggering specific mobile haptic patterns during the “Add to Cart” or “Swipe for More” moments can make shopping memorable by mimicking physical engagement.

When it comes to digital DTC ecosystems, brands must start leaning into the senses we do have access to in order to compensate for the senses we don’t. That means rethinking everything from photos and colors to copywriting and more, not just showing off the product but painting a lush sensory experience too.