Feelings play a central role in everyday life. Without them, we cannot form emotional bonds with people, animals, objects, or brands. The best way to trigger feelings is through our senses. And emotion is the strongest path to a true brand experience. Yet one key sense is still absent in most brand work: touch. Could brands become something you can literally feel? We may be closer to that next step than we think.
A brand’s visual identity matters, but on its own it no longer wins the fight for attention. To create emotion across all levels, brands use not only visual and audio assets but also signal themselves through scent and taste. Sounds and scents are perfected in the lab, from the smell of a new car to the crunch of cornflakes crafted in a sound studio.
Sight, sound, scent, and taste are well covered in branding. But what about touch? Finishes, soft-touch coatings, and textured print effects clearly flow from brand values. The surface feel of a product is brand relevant too (“materiality”). For physical objects, you also have to think in three dimensions, as with packaging or trade show booths. The deeper question is this: what would it feel like to be touched by a brand? What if the person did not touch the brand, but the brand touched them?
How would that work? We can look to the gaming industry. The tech is already here. Spanish innovator OWO has developed a haptic gaming system: a shirt with integrated sensors that can stimulate 10 different muscle zones with electrical impulses. This creates distinct touch sensations across the upper body and arms.
In gaming, these haptic sensors give players a realistic sense of touch and interaction in virtual environments. With the shirt, brands could design their own brand-aligned touch patterns – the “Corporate Touch” – so customers build emotional bonds at a tactile level. That would give “look and feel” a completely new meaning in branding.
Photos: Thumbnail generated with Midjourney; shirt photo by us.
