Brands go analog as AI flattens creativity into sameness

For years, brands have competed for attention through what consumers can see. Logos, colours, packaging, typography, advertising and increasingly polished digital content have formed the visual language of brand building. But as AI makes it easier to create, replicate and scale visual content, simply looking distinctive is becoming harder. The next frontier may be what consumers cannot scroll past!

Smell. Sound. Touch. Texture. Even the way a physical space feels.

That shift is showing up in increasingly creative ways. Rare Beauty recently took the humble billboard beyond sight, turning it into a scratch-and-sniff experience for the launch of its new fragrance. The activation may be designed to grab attention, but it also points to a larger question facing brands: when every screen can be filled with increasingly sophisticated visual content, what can brands do that a screen cannot?

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The answer, increasingly, is to make people experience the brand rather than simply see it.

And brands have been playing this game in subtler ways for years. Mysore Sandal Soap is proof that sometimes, a brand can enter your memory through your nose before it ever enters your eyes. That is the power of sensory branding.

A colour, a sound, a smell or even a texture can sometimes tell you which brand you are looking at before the brand actually tells you. Remember the unmistakable crunch of a Britannia 50-50 biscuit?

The logo is only the beginning…

Harish Bijoor, Brand Guru and Founder, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc., puts it simply. “A brand itself is fundamentally sensory. Branding is a subject which is really more brand sensorial than brand physicals,” he said. For him, the real power lies in the associations these cues build over time and that durability is precisely what's becoming scarce elsewhere. “From my personal studies, sensory branding is an association, an association which is far more valuable than anything else,” he added.

Ashish Mishra, CEO, Interbrand India & South Asia, says the agency began looking beyond visual identity almost a decade ago, well ahead of the current AI-driven content glut. “We evolved from visual identity to brand feel almost a decade ago, building a process around it using contextual experience, desired experience, persona and experience metaphor,” he said.

That head start looks prescient now! A framework built to move beyond the visual is, incidentally, a framework built to survive a world where the visual is cheap to fake.

Avi Kumar, Chief Marketing Officer, FNP, sees this play out without any engineering at all, in categories where the product itself does the work, categories that are, by nature, resistant to synthetic substitution. “The fragrance across FNP stores helps create a familiar and memorable environment,” Kumar said. “For us, sensory branding is not a separate layer; it is naturally embedded in the way customers discover, experience and remember FNP.”

When the store becomes the experience

The opportunity becomes even more pointed in physical retail, where brands can engage senses no AI-generated ad, product shot or chatbot ever will.

Harmeet Singh, Chief Brand Officer, The Body Shop Asia South, says, “Sensory experiences fundamentally shape how customers discover and connect with our products. The sustained double-digit growth across our fragrance portfolio is a clear signal of that resonance.”

The brand is now extending that thinking directly into its stores, framing it as a response to exactly the kind of commoditization that cheap, abundant content produces elsewhere.

“We're at an inflection point where a store can no longer justify its existence simply by stocking products, e-commerce does that faster and cheaper. What physical retail can do uniquely is engage the senses in ways a screen structurally cannot,” Singh said. “We don't view scent, texture, sound, and pace as mere ambience; they are data points with a direct line to conversion. A customer who can smell a fragrance before buying trusts the product far more than one reading a description, and someone lingering in a well-calibrated environment converts at a completely different rate. That isn't just design philosophy, it's a critical P&L input.”

Mishra points to Starbucks as perhaps the clearest example of how this can be systematised at scale, long before AI made the case more urgent. “Our most famous, and arguably most successful, case study in sensorial branding would clearly be Starbucks, developed by our American colleagues a few decades ago. The meticulous experience strategy at Starbucks guides the cumulative coherence of brand feel by providing calibrated ranges for luminescence, smell, sound decibels, colours and textures, while allowing flexibility around local materials and layouts,” he said.

At The Body Shop, the shift is about making the physical environment work harder as digital commerce absorbs the transactional layer, the same layer that generative tools are now busy automating!

“The store's role shifts entirely toward experience, memory, and emotional imprint. Brands that treat sensory strategy as peripheral rather than central will find their stores becoming simple showrooms for someone else's checkout page. Our new and refreshed stores are built to prevent that to create meaningful brand connection,” Singh said.

The experience doesn't end at checkout

At The Leela Palaces, this thinking is deliberate and long-term, built on the same premise: a memory built through sound, taste or scent is far harder to displace than one built through a feed.

“We create an emotional connection with the guests,” said Anuraag Bhatnagar, Whole-time Director and Chief Executive Officer, pointing to music that is “crafted, curated, very bespoke, with a purpose.” That music, he explained, “plays in your subconscious” and stays with guests long after they've checked out. “That creates a recall and the recall creates a return.”

It is also treated as an investment, not a campaign expense. “This is part of brand investment. We pull in a budget from the brand investment fund to build this sensory experience for long-term brand image building.”

The tricky business of measuring emotion

That long horizon raises an obvious question: how do you put a number on it, particularly when the thing you're defending against is as diffuse as “everything online looking the same”?

Bijoor doesn't think you can, at least not with the usual tools. “There is just no metric that can tell you that,” he said, arguing sensory investments have to be judged by measures that are “feel-oriented and emotion-oriented.”

Bhatnagar frames it as a different kind of return altogether. “It's more of an ROE, return on emotions instead of ROI for us at the Leela,” he said.

Mandeep Chopra, Founder and Managing Director, Limited Edt, agrees the two aren't in competition. “Of course, ROI is important. Nobody says it's not. But I think the key thing with what we do is making people feel the emotions, whether they love sports or whether they love lifestyle. If whatever we do triggers that emotion in somebody, then yes, it's ROE to me, more so,” he said.

For Mishra, however, the measurement conversation is evolving alongside the practice itself. “Auditing the experience before the brand intervention and then tracking it subsequently, alongside performance metrics, helps measure progress. That said, there isn't enough adoption of the practice yet for the industry to have developed standardised ROI measurement for it,” he said.

“We believe a combination of neuroscience, sensorial experience mapping, brand strength audits and performance analytics can work well as measurement metrics for this critical and evolving opportunity for businesses,” he added.

The Indian context

For all the emotion brands are chasing, Chopra thinks India's retail experience largely hasn't caught up, even as the pressure to differentiate only grows. “I still think there's a lot people can do. It's still a bit more transactional here. You're not going to get many stores where you get that emotion,” he said.

He points to what he's seen in Japan and Europe, where the smallest details carry the brand: the incense that hits you at the door, the way a space is designed, a store with just three products where each one still feels significant. “It's really about getting that experience,” he added.

The shift towards sensory branding is also being driven by a broader change in consumer behaviour, according to Mishra, one that a synthetic-content-saturated internet only accelerates.

“With growing cultural signs confirming the need for people to seek indulgent and immersive experiences that provide an escape from fluid lives, reconnect them with authenticity, offer comforting rewards, make healthy pursuits more palatable and more, it is indeed useful to accelerate the development of this stream,” he said.

Zomato's stunts are a smaller-scale version of the same instinct. Its minimalist, logo-free red newspaper ad marking its 18th birthday on July 10, 2026, carried just one line “happy 18th birthday to us. thank you for keeping us in your hearts (and bank statements)”  and relied entirely on colour to be recognisable. Just last week, Zomato ran a similar trick, turning a full-page newspaper ad into a birthday wish for a rival. It never named Swiggy, but the orange colour palette and understated design made it instantly clear who the message was for.

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Neither ad would be hard for a generative model to reproduce visually. What do they lean on instead? institutional memory! A colour association built over years. Cultural timing is exactly the kind of accumulated, human-built context AI still can't manufacture from scratch.

And perhaps that is where sensory branding's real advantage lies now. In a world where an AI system can generate a passable logo, a competent headline or a scroll's worth of on-brand creative in seconds, the things that still require a human hand, a real space or an actual product to deliver, for example, a fragrance, a jingle, a texture, a room calibrated for how it feels to stand in it are becoming the harder, and therefore more valuable, thing to own.

The most powerful brand cue may not be the one consumers see. Increasingly, it may be the one no algorithm can generate for them.