You can say your brand is premium, thoughtful, or welcoming – but if it doesn’t feel that way, your clients won’t believe it.
Before anyone reads a single word, your brand is already communicating. Through the lighting in your photography. The texture of your packaging. The scent in your space. These sensory details trigger emotions instantly – and those emotions are what clients remember, share, and trust.
The Six Senses That Shape Brand Emotion
When we think about sensory branding, most people focus on the visual. But that’s just the beginning. Every one of the six senses – sight, scent, sound, touch, taste, and intuition – can be used to create intentional emotional responses. And when they align, your brand becomes more than recognizable. It becomes unforgettable.
Here’s how each sense maps to emotion, and how to use it to build connection and loyalty in your design business.
Sight: Meaning, Identity, Recognition
Sight is how we decide what something is – and whether it belongs in our world.
It creates understanding, aesthetic judgment, and instant emotional interpretation. From your website layout to your color palette to the way your team dresses at a trade show, visual cues tell the client who you are and whether you’re for them.
Sight gives context and influences how we perceive quality, professionalism, and brand alignment.
Use sight to:
- Align with client aspirations
- Clarify your brand’s position
- Reinforce visual trust
As a designer, you can use visual consistency across every touchpoint to make clients feel aligned and confident. From the layout of your proposals to the tone of your social feed, what clients see should reflect your positioning.
Example: Color-coded digital project folders that match your brand palette. It’s a small touch that reinforces trust and professionalism.
Scent: Memory, Desire, Familiarity
Scent is the emotional shortcut. It bypasses the logical brain and hits memory and emotion directly.
It creates instant recall, craving, safety, even nostalgia. That’s why a subtle note of vanilla in a welcome gift can feel comforting, or a citrus scent in a packaging insert can feel energizing.
This is the most emotionally powerful sense, and often the most underused.
Use scent to:
- Build brand familiarity
- Create emotional memory
- Increase brand recall subconsciously
More: Scent Marketing – What Is It And How Do You Leverage It?
You can introduce scent to build emotional memory. A consistent fragrance in your sample kits, studio, or gift boxes becomes a subtle cue that reinforces your brand story.
Example: Diffusing the same scent during all client presentations and in your client gifting such as a candle creates familiarity and builds subconscious brand recall.
Sound: Emotion, Focus, Pace
Sound creates rhythm. It sets mood before your client even realizes it.
Whether it’s the background playlist in your studio, the music in your product videos, or even the pacing of your voice in an onboarding call, sound cues influence focus, energy, and emotional tone.
Sound helps your client feel something before they’ve consciously processed the experience.
Use sound to:
- Set the emotional tempo
- Guide attention and energy
- Reinforce your brand’s tone of voice
Use sound to create rhythm and emotional tone. Background playlists, custom audio cues, or voice notes can set the right atmosphere at every stage of your process.
Example: Adding a soft chime at key moments in your onboarding videos helps guide attention and keeps clients engaged. Playing your signature playlist at the background when your clients are viewing your selected materials is also powerful.
Touch: Trust, Quality, Grounding
Touch is how your brand proves it’s real.
Texture, weight, softness, temperature – these sensory cues immediately trigger assumptions about quality, care, and authenticity. A smooth velvet sample, a heavy printed lookbook, or even a cold stone surface… all say something.
Touch is presence. And it builds trust.
Use touch to:
- Communicate craftsmanship and care
- Signal premium positioning
- Deepen the emotional imprint of physical products
Elevate trust by choosing textures that feel intentional and high-quality. The weight, softness, and finish of materials all signal care and craftsmanship.
Example: Presenting FF&E specs in a stitched portfolio folder with your brand’s accent color makes the handoff feel curated and elevated.
Taste: Reward, Joy, Connection
Taste is tied to ritual, satisfaction, and celebration. It’s pleasure, but it’s also identity.
You don’t have to sell food to use taste. One client included dark chocolate truffles in their onboarding gift, aligning the flavor with the deep green tones of their visual brand. Clients posted the chocolate more than the mood board.
Taste creates peak emotional moments, often the final sensory note in a complete experience.
Use taste to:
- Add celebration to your process
- Create emotional reward in your brand journey
- Reinforce connection and care
As a designer, you can use taste to mark celebration points in your client journey. It adds a human, sensory layer to the emotional experience you’re creating.
Example: Sending a box of locally made savory snacks that reflect the design location gives your brand a flavorful, unexpected moment of connection.
Intuition: Alignment, Belonging, Flow
This is the sixth sense. The gut feeling. The “this just feels right” response.
When all the sensory elements are in sync – when the visual, verbal, spatial, and emotional cues match your values and offer – clients don’t just say yes. They feel pulled toward you.
Intuition shapes long-term loyalty and makes your brand feel like home.
Use intuitive alignment to:
- Build brand congruence
- Shorten the decision-making process
- Strengthen client loyalty
Align your process with intuitive decision-making. When the experience flows naturally and every cue feels congruent, clients are more likely to trust you.
Example: If you notice a client spending time reviewing cabinetry selections inside the client portal, your next email can include a tip about storage solutions or a soft nudge to confirm preferences. It shows you’re tuned in and reinforces confidence in your process.
Why Emotions (And Senses) Belong In Your Strategy
Remember this: Emotions drive buying decisions, logic justifies them later (which is often the reason clients are experiencing buyers remorse even if they know they made the right decision… that’s why, your buying process needs to address this immediately!)
Your clients are not just evaluating your work, they’re feeling your brand. If it triggers the right emotion, the buying process speeds up. If it doesn’t, you’re stuck in hesitation, negotiation, or worse: ghosting.
When you intentionally design for emotion using the six senses, you:
- Strengthen memory and referral because emotional moments get shared
- Shorten the sales cycle because clients feel the offer is right
- Increase loyalty because the experience feels aligned
- Create pricing power because every sensory cue reinforces value
Connecting the right sense to the right emotion (and do it consistently) increases brand clarity, client confidence, and conversion. That’s why multi-sensory design isn’t just a creative detail. It’s a business asset.
Design For Emotion – Not Just Aesthetic
Here’s your emotional cue list:
- Scent = Memory, Comfort, Desire
- Sound = Trust, Calm, Energy
- Touch = Quality, Connection
- Sight = Clarity, Status, Safety
- Taste = Celebration, Identity, Emotion
- Intuition = Trust, Belonging, Alignment
Start with one. What do you want your clients to feel? Then choose the sense that can trigger that emotion.
