Close your eyes and walk into your favourite coffee shop. You can probably hear it before you can see it: the hiss of the steam wand, the clatter of cups, a particular kind of music at a particular volume. You can smell it too. If someone led you in blindfolded, you’d likely know where you were within seconds.
Now try the same exercise with a business you’ve visited once and forgotten. There’s nothing there. Perhaps a logo, if you’re lucky.
Brand experience specialists have started talking about “total branding”: identities that work through sound, scent, texture and motion as well as a logo and a colour palette. Alongside it sits the idea of the “phygital” experience, where digital touches such as apps, QR codes and personalised content are now simply expected as part of the physical one.
Both trends can sound like expensive add-ons. But every business already has a sound, a smell, a feel and, increasingly, a digital front door. The only question is whether anyone has chosen them on purpose.
One Like insight: Your logo is the smallest part of how customers experience your brand.
The senses are already selling
In 1997, psychologists at the University of Leicester ran a small experiment in a British supermarket that has been quoted ever since. They set up a display of four French and four German wines, matched for price and sweetness, each with its national flag. On alternate days over two weeks, a tape deck on the top shelf played either French accordion music or German Bierkeller tunes.
On French music days, the French wines outsold the German ones. On German music days, the German wines won. Writing in Nature, Adrian North, David Hargreaves and Jennifer McKendrick concluded that musical fit had “a profound influence on product choice”. The part that makes marketers sit up came next. Of the 44 shoppers who answered a questionnaire, only six said the music had influenced what they chose.
It was one store, two weeks and a modest sample, and the authors themselves suggested further tests. But the finding has been widely discussed for nearly three decades because it captures something uncomfortable: the senses shape decisions in ways people don’t notice and wouldn’t admit to.
That cuts both ways for a business. A thoughtfully chosen soundtrack, smell or texture can quietly reinforce what you want customers to feel. A careless one can quietly undermine it. The radio station a staff member happened to pick this morning is still part of your brand, whether or not anyone decided it should be.
Highlight: Customers rarely notice your soundtrack. That doesn’t mean it isn’t working, for you or against you.
When the senses agree
If one sense can nudge a decision, it seems logical that more senses would nudge it further. The research suggests something more interesting: what matters most is whether the senses agree with each other.
Researchers at Washington State University, including David Sprott and Eric Spangenberg, tested this with something everybody recognises: Christmas shopping. Students looked at slides of a proposed new store and rated it while hearing either Christmas or non-Christmas music, with or without a Christmas scent in the air. Christmas music with a Christmas scent produced higher ratings. But a Christmas scent paired with non-Christmas music seemed to put people off. Adding more sensory cues didn’t automatically help. Adding mismatched ones could actively hurt.
“This idea of congruency is powerful,” Sprott said, explaining that people move towards situations where they feel comfortable and relaxed, and consistency helps them feel that way.
This is the part of the “total branding” trend that tends to get lost in the excitement about custom soundscapes and signature scents. A beautifully designed fragrance in a shop with clashing music and harsh lighting may simply add to the confusion. The goal isn’t to stimulate every sense. It’s to make sure every sense is telling the same story.
[Infographic placement] Is your brand telling one story? A central circle containing a single word that describes the feeling the business wants to create (for example, “calm” or “energetic”). Around it, five spokes for sight, sound, smell, touch and digital, each with one short question: Do our colours and lighting feel calm? Does our music? Does the space smell right? Do our materials and packaging feel right in the hand? Does our website or app feel the same? Caption: Congruence matters more than quantity. Based on the Washington State University research.
Highlight: More senses don’t make a stronger brand. Senses that agree with each other do.
The digital layer is now part of the room
The same principle applies to the newest sense a brand has to manage: the screen in every customer’s pocket.
“Phygital” is an awkward word for a simple idea. Physical experiences now come with a digital layer, whether that’s a QR code on a table, an app at an event, a booking confirmation or the Instagram post someone checks before deciding whether to visit. Julia Charles Event Management observes that guests no longer find this impressive. They assume it. As the agency puts it, “Nobody’s pitching phygital as a differentiator any more”. If the QR code leads nowhere useful, it reads as a failure, much like broken Wi-Fi.
That expectation is backed up by how people now shop. McKinsey’s 2026 State of the Consumer report found that 28% of Gen Z respondents were already using generative AI tools for shopping, and that social media had become the most important channel for that generation’s decisions. For many customers, the digital version of your business is the first room they walk into.
Which brings us back to congruence. A warm, characterful shop with a cold, confusing website sends two different messages. So does a beautifully designed event whose follow-up email feels like a generic newsletter. The digital layer doesn’t need to be sophisticated. It needs to feel like the same business.
AI-powered personalisation, the other big trend in this space, raises the same issue in a sharper form. Events that adapt content or layouts to each guest’s behaviour can feel thoughtful, or they can feel like surveillance. We explored where that line falls in The Difference Between Being Remembered and Being Watched. The short version: people welcome being recognised for what they’ve chosen to share, and resist being tracked in ways they didn’t expect.
Highlight: For many customers, your website is the first room they walk into. Make sure it feels like the rest of the house.
What this means for a small business
The good news is that sensory branding rarely needs a sensory branding agency. It needs someone to notice what customers are already experiencing and to make a few deliberate choices.
Start by choosing one word for how you want customers to feel. Then walk through your business as a stranger would, from the first search result to the moment they leave, and ask whether each sense supports that word. A physiotherapy practice that wants to feel calm might discover that its reception plays a lively commercial radio station, smells faintly of cleaning products and has a booking page full of jargon. None of those things is a disaster. Together, they quietly tell a different story from the one on the sign.
A few questions can help:
- What do customers hear, smell and touch when they deal with us, and did anyone choose it?
- Do all of those things support the same feeling?
- Does our website, booking process or follow-up feel like the same business as the physical one?
- Is there one sensory detail customers could come to associate with us, such as a sound, a scent or a texture?
Which brings us back to the coffee shop you could recognise blindfolded. Its owners probably never wrote a sensory brand strategy. They simply made consistent choices for long enough that the place became unmistakable. That’s the real lesson of total branding. You don’t need more senses. You need them all to be on the same side.
Sources
- Adrian North, David Hargreaves and Jennifer McKendrick, “In-store music affects product choice”, Nature 390, 132 (1997).
- Washington State University, “Attitudes, ads, music kindle holiday buying”, 2 December 2005. Summary of Spangenberg, Grohmann and Sprott, “It’s beginning to smell (and sound) a lot like Christmas”, Journal of Business Research 58(11), 2005.
- Julia Charles Event Management, “Trends in Immersive Brand Experiences for 2026”, June 2026.
- McKinsey, “State of the Consumer 2026”, 22 June 2026.
