The world is steadily growing digital. Simultaneously the lust for sensation is increasing. This leads to exciting new ways of brand management if marketers think of those two trends together.

1,045,510,000. This is the number of websites existing globally as of June 2016*. Two thirds of these are unused placeholders or repeated websites with different top-level domains. The rest, however – about 200 million websites – compete with each other for users’ attention, which is increasingly becoming a scarce commodity as people become increasingly demanding, particularly in digital spaces.

This is bad news for most German websites, as they are often the same as they were in 1995: static, text-heavy and far from sensory: exactly the opposite of what the consumer expects today – and what his brain prefers.

The keyword here is multi-sensory brand management. In practice, this mostly is limited to audio branding in the form of jingles. Multi-Sensory marketing, meaning addressing target groups on multiple senses, is a long-known approach. Evidence of this phenomenon goes back as 1932, when a scientific article reported higher sales of jeans when accompanied by a certain scent. Today we know that classical music in cafés stimulates rest and consumation of Caffé Lattes, and that French chansons played in a supermarket increase the sales of French wine. Thanks to neuroscience we also know how this process works – and that it can be implemented in all fields of marketing.

Let‘s recap: human beings experience their environment using five senses. Pictures, sounds, scents, flavors and textures trigger different associations and therefore emotions. If one message addresses several senses, this means not just an added effect, but a multiplied one. The more senses involved, the stronger the emotion – and the stronger a potential conversion to a brand.

However, our senses are much more than mere triggers for activation. They are also able to transport content and meaning: Car manufacturers use textural signals to activate quality concepts in the brain by using high quality wood, leather or textiles. By creating a bottle that “pops” or a cookie that crunches when chewed, a feeling of freshness and delicacy can be communicated. Seeing a meadow of flowers in an ad for washing agent and fabric softener immediately evokes that particular scent. And when this bottle of fabric softener falls onto a pile of soft towels, the feeling of softness, which the softener produces, is almost palpable.