The brands we love to love live in our memory as the experience of familiar sensation. We can recall the crinkle, snap, fizz, melt, crunch or tingle that tells you exactly what is coming before you have even thought about it.  

That matters because being memorable is where brands win. 

So how do you build a brand to be unforgettable?  

It’s all about unlocking Sensational Advantage.

Sensational Advantage is the power of building brands around their full product experience. That means focusing not just on what they say, or how they look, but what they make people feel and how that’s expressed in their unique combination of taste, smell, touch, sight and sound.    

Put simply, it’s a way of helping brands become more vivid in memory, more distinctive in the category, and more likely to be chosen again.  

Instinctive and evidence-based

Here at Huxly, our instincts have always drawn us to sensory experience. We’ve known for a long time that thinking about products or brands purely through the lens of what you can see – or even see and hear – just isn’t enough. 

Now, by our own admission, we’re a bunch of complete foodies who get very excited about sensation, but the thing was, we knew it couldn’t just be us. And every time we brought a multi-sensory approach to a project, it proved the point – sensation fuels emotion and memorability. 

These memories are powerful because they are not flat. They are layered. They combine sensation, emotion and context. 

The scientific evidence also stacked up – scientists have known for a long time that there’s a powerful link between sense and memory.  Multi-sensory experiences can create richer memory traces, especially when the senses are working together in a way that feels consistent and meaningful.  And the more of your senses something stimulates, the more intense that memory becomes. 

We looked at why our concepts and brand positioning were working.  We believe it’s because we’d connected a person’s true need with the sensory experience they desired. Using that understanding to help brands build and market products that really resonated meant a clear commercial benefit for our clients.

Unlocking mental availability

But why was Sensational Advantage… a commercial advantage? It’s about mental availability.  It’s now a commonly held belief that brands that are remembered in a purchase occasion have high mental availability. So, whether we’re standing the shelf, on a phone, in front of the fridge or scrolling through a delivery app - we rarely make perfect, rational, fully considered choices. We reach for what comes to mind. The brand we can picture, the taste we can almost imagine, the product experience they remember wanting to repeat.  

Because let’s face it, as with our ‘consumer’ hat on, we’re promiscuous. We shop around. We could choose anything, at any moment. And what bubbles to the surface of our busy brains, will be the memory that’s most vivid – the one rooted in multiple senses.

So that really strong, vivid memory is what brands need to evoke when we think of them or see them on shelf. As product innovators or marketers, we want the people standing at the shelf to vividly, subconsciously recall the way our product tasted, smelled, felt, or even sounded – as well as how it looks. Because if they can, and those associations are positive, that’s likely to be a powerful push to buy.

Your product is your most underused brand asset

So much brand-building effort still starts with what can be seen: the key brand assets, the pack, the campaign, the social feed. These things matter, of course they do.

But for many brands, especially in FMCG, one of their most powerful assets is the product experience itself - the taste, the texture, the smell, the sound, the ritual, the way it behaves in someone’s hand, mouth or home.

That is the part people take home with them. It is the thing they actually live with. It is what they buy, use, judge and remember. 

The sound of a can opening. The cool blast of a chewing gum. The creamy melt of chocolate. These things are not just product details. They are memory cues. And memory cues are brand assets.

That shift in thinking is powerful. It means the product signature can be designed, protected and amplified with the same intentionality as visual identity. It can inform product development, packaging, communications, retail, sampling and renovation.

Mind the gap between brand and product

Yet too often, product experience is treated as something separate from brand strategy. A product truth sits quietly in the background while the brand does the emotional heavy lifting somewhere else. The risk is a gap between what the brand promises and what the product delivers.

That gap matters. If the campaign creates one expectation and the product creates another, the first purchase may still happen - but the second one is at risk.

Sensational Advantage closes that gap. It connects the consumer desire with the sensory experience the product can credibly deliver, so the brand promise is not just communicated. It is experienced. 

Innovation needs to be felt earlier

This is especially important in innovation.

Many ideas begin life as words on a page: “granola clusters with almonds and chocolate chips”, “a lighter chocolate bar”, “a refreshing fruit drink”, “a nourishing daily supplement”. Useful, perhaps. But not enough.

Words can describe an idea. They do not always make you feel it.

And if an innovation idea does not make people feel anything at the start, it becomes harder for R&D teams, design teams, marketers and consumers to understand what it is really meant to become. 

At Huxly, we build sensation in earlier. When we innovate, we look at people’s lives, their cultural influences, the moments that matter, the emotions the brand wants to create, and the sensory cues that could make that experience more memorable. Then we bring that thinking into the room. 

We do this using carefully curated stimulus to react to - things to touch, things to smell,  visual worlds, texture references, rituals, semiotic cues. The kinds of details that move an idea from “that sounds nice” to “I know exactly what this should feel like.”

That means teams do not leave with just an idea. They leave with a richer experience brief: what the product should make you feel, how it should behave, what the sensory signature should be, and how it can show up across pack, product, comms and activation.

For R&D, that reduces guesswork. For marketing, it creates a stronger story. For consumers, it creates a clearer reason to believe.

Concept testing should show the experience, not flatten it

There is another reason this matters: the way innovation is tested.

Too often, concepts are judged through a written description and a pack shot. That may be efficient, but it can also strip out the very thing that makes an idea exciting: the experience.

If the future product is meant to feel indulgent, refreshing, comforting, energising or sensorially surprising, then the test stimulus has to work harder than a few lines of copy. It needs to help people imagine what they are really being asked to choose.

In our own exploratory work, we have seen how richer stimulus, like realistic visualisation and contextual worlds, can help consumers engage more with an idea, helping them feel and anticipate the experience they might get.

Let’s give the people what they deserve

Building unforgettable brands through sensation has huge commercial potential that’s largely going untapped. But at Huxly, we’re here for it.  

We believe the world needs more products created to deliver the experiences people actually want – and more heroing of those experiences in a brand’s positioning and in its communication. Because humans deserve to know what kind of experience they’ll get once they hand their money over.  

If those campaigns really nail their portrayal of that experience, they’ll draw in the people who want to feel that way. Then, once those consumers have tried and loved the product, every time they see the campaign – or indeed the product on shelf – their sense-built memory will be rekindled, along with their desire to buy again, and again.  

So, whether you’re a product innovator, insight lead, or marketer, if you want to explore your brand’s Sensational Advantage, we’re right with you. We’re here to help you see the joy in your product, bring it to life, and use it to create powerful commercial impact.  

Like to discover your Sensational Advantage with Huxly? We’re happy to get the team round the table and help you make it happen. Talk to us today!