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The Role of Touch in Consumer Behavior

Touch plays an important role in sensory marketing and consumer behavior. Allowing customers to physically interact with products, such as through test drives, in-store displays, or product samples, creates a sense of ownership that can influence purchase decisions. Research shows that interpersonal touch like handshakes can make people feel safer and spend more, while the tactile experience of different materials like fabrics impacts post-purchase satisfaction. Marketers are exploring haptic marketing techniques to leverage the sense of touch even in e-commerce, aiming to replicate the in-person experiences that online shopping lacks. Overall, the role of touch in connecting customers to brands and driving purchases should not be overlooked in marketing strategy.

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21 views

The Role of Touch in Consumer Behavior

Touch plays an important role in sensory marketing and consumer behavior. Allowing customers to physically interact with products, such as through test drives, in-store displays, or product samples, creates a sense of ownership that can influence purchase decisions. Research shows that interpersonal touch like handshakes can make people feel safer and spend more, while the tactile experience of different materials like fabrics impacts post-purchase satisfaction. Marketers are exploring haptic marketing techniques to leverage the sense of touch even in e-commerce, aiming to replicate the in-person experiences that online shopping lacks. Overall, the role of touch in connecting customers to brands and driving purchases should not be overlooked in marketing strategy.

Uploaded by

inusui slythering
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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The Role of Touch in Consumer Behavior

Introduction

What Is Sensory Marketing?

Before we talk about sensory marketing, we should define sensory branding, which is a type of marketing that appeals to
all senses. Sensory marketing is the techniques that are used to reach your customer’s senses and influence their
behavior based on how your brand and tactics make them feel.

As we know, the five senses are sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell. Sensory marketing is simply the process of
winning a customer’s trust and attention by appealing to each of these five senses. To no surprise, it has become popular
among a variety of industries and businesses around the world to implement sensory marketing into their overall strategy.

Sensory marketing provides a complete experience. For this reason, it stands out as a uniquely interactive way to win
audience attention. One of the biggest marketing mistakes a brand can make is catering only to a single sense at a time.

Content

Sensory Marketing to Help Build Your Brand

Today, taking advantage of sensory marketing is one of the smartest ways for brands to trigger emotion and maintain
engagement. What’s more, it’s available to brands in all industries and specialties. So regardless of whether you sell
clothing or tech products, this is a tactic you can use to grow your brand.

Designed to place the importance of the customer experience at the forefront, sensory marketing is a powerful method for
any company who wants to make its interactions with customers more meaningful and compelling. What’s more, it’s
accessible and easy to use, and when you get it right, it has the potential to overhaul your marketing strategy.

Touch in Marketing

In this presentation, we will try to understand what touch is, which implications it can have in sensory marketing, and how
it can affect product and business definitions. The sense of touch is one of the central forms of perceptual experience.
Positive touch from others is necessary for an individual’s healthy development. Often ignored when we talk about our
fundamental senses, the sensation of touch is a fundamental part of our daily experience, influencing what we buy, who
we love and even how we heal. We use this sense to gather information about our surroundings and as a means of
establishing trust and social bonds with other people. Vision and smell alone are not always enough for consumers to
evaluate products or to make purchase decisions, and including other important information, such as on the form,
robustness, texture or weight of a product perceived by the sense of touch (or tactile sense) for sure will help. Visual and
tactile senses can be identified as the most active of our five senses. In retail management practice, it is obvious that the
tactile sense, as a sensory channel, is significant in purchase and consumption processes for goods such as cars,
computers, clothing, home equipment, mobile phones, shoes or for restaurant services. The question of whether merely
touching an object influences a consumer’s perception of ownership and the amount they are willing to pay for an object
has not been investigated in depth.

The first rule of retail sales is, "Get the customer to hold the product." As an important aspect of sensory marketing, touch
enhances customers' interaction with a brand's products. Physically holding products can create a sense of ownership,
triggering "must-have" purchase decisions. Medical research has proven that pleasant touching experiences cause the
brain to release the so-called "love hormone," oxytocin, which leads to feelings of calmness and well-being.

As with the sense of taste, tactile marketing cannot be done at a distance. It requires that the customer interact directly
with the brand, usually through in-store experiences. This has led many retailers to display un-boxed products on open
shelves, rather than in closed-display cases. Major customer electronics retailers like Best Buy and the Apple Store are
known for encouraging shoppers to handle high-end items.

Research cited by the Harvard Business Review shows that actual interpersonal touch, such as a handshake or a light pat
on the shoulder, leads people to feel safer and spend more money. Studies have shown that waitresses who touch the
diners they are serving earn more in tips.

What is haptic marketing?

Haptic information is the information we acquire using the power of touch. Haptic marketing is a relatively new discipline
that focuses on the use of tactile sensations to influence purchasing.
Back in the olden days, when shopping was done primarily in person, we frequently used haptic feedback in our product
assessments—we felt fabrics, pushed buttons, squatted in jeans, and squeezed cantaloupes.

Thanks to the rise of e-commerce, we now see things in picture form and use product specs and customer reviews to fill
in the gaps of our understanding.

In many cases, we don’t hold what we’ve bought until the box arrives. In some cases, that leads to disappointment: “This
fabric isn’t as sturdy as I thought it would be” or “These headphones don’t feel comfortable.”

How can you use haptic marketing?

Given the potential impact of touch to increase confidence, sentiment, ownership, and value perception of a product, it’s
not a bad idea for marketers to think about how to leverage this sense as part of customer experience.

Examples

Consider that people who sit in soft chairs are willing to pay higher prices than those who sit in hard chairs.

More and more studies are being conducted that prove the great influence touch has on human behavior and purchasing
decisions. We don’t need studies to know touch plays a vital role in marketing. Car dealerships have known this for years:
it’s the reason for the test drive. If their customers bought on visuals alone, they’d never have to take their cars for a spin.
No, customers want to know how the cars feel before they buy. In this respect, car dealerships have long been ahead of
the game, even if they didn’t have any scientific research to back them up. It’s common sense, if you will.

Apple recognized the power of touch for marketing, which is why they made their iPhones and other products available to
be picked up, felt, and test drove right in their own stores. Other mobile device manufacturers and wireless providers
followed suit in their own retail stores, and for good reason. Showing customers, a picture is never the same as putting a
product in their hands that begs to be taken home. Touch-based marketing isn’t limited to retail, either. Many waitresses
have learned they’ll receive higher tips, on average, if they make physical contact with their patrons – a simple touch on
the shoulder will suffice. A warm handshake helps break the ice prior to business negotiations.

Conclusion

The role of touch in marketing is powerful, even if not fully understood. It stands to reason that future studies will yield
even more data about the role of touch in marketing, data business can take action on to more effectively promote their
brands, products, and services.

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