With consumers seeking deeper emotional connections with brands, the rise of immersive experiences is reshaping consumer engagement in the beauty industry. According to the latest whitepaper from the beauty insights platform BEAUTYSTREAMS, brands that integrate sensory elements—such as scent, texture, and virtual reality—into their storytelling see higher customer engagement and retention rates.
For example, the report highlighted that multi-sensory marketing strategies can increase brand recall by up to 70% as compared to traditional single-sensory advertising. Additionally, the global beauty industry is increasingly leveraging virtual reality (VR) and extended reality (XR) to offer inclusive product experiences, making beauty more accessible to those with sensory impairments.
We spoke to Mazzilli, Trend Localization & Business Development Director, North America, at BEAUTYSTREAMS for deeper insights into the report, key takeaways, and its potential industry impact.
CDU: The whitepaper highlights how immersive storytelling can enhance consumer engagement. How are beauty brands currently leveraging multi-sensory experiences to create deeper consumer connections?
Eleonora Mazzilli (EM): The once-futuristic tools of AR, VR, AI beauty, and other disruptive technologies have become an integral part of the beauty shopping experience and are reshaping the consumer shopping process as a whole. Tech advances, big data, artificial intelligence, and augmented reality are among the technologies that brands are employing to enhance and personalize the consumer experience.
In retail, online and offline channels are no longer competing but are interconnected, as new once-futuristic retail concepts blur the lines between physical, digital, and even virtual experiences. The brick-and-mortar spaces fuse a sensory experience with creative concepts that are more entertaining and immersive than ever, allowing consumers to interact with the brand and products in new, experimental ways.
By offering high-tech technologies and immersive in-store events, alongside advanced personalization, brands and retailers are redefining the idea of conventional commercial spaces with new stores designed to serve not only as a shopping experience but also as “retailtainment,” blending retail, interactive installations, virtual artworks, digital analysis-led experiences, multi-sensory and experimentation spaces, on-site livestreaming, and a hyper-personalized retail approach.
Digital native brands and e-commerce retailers are increasingly moving toward an omnichannel strategy by experimenting with physical retail, thus reinforcing the growing crossover between IRL and URL shopping. Taking their cues from digital and online shopping experiences alike, this new generation of physical stores offers engaging shopping by employing the latest technologies, such as AI and AR, to provide personalized, multi-sensory, and interactive consumer experiences.
While virtual stores are gradually becoming new platforms via which brands can entice shoppers and enhance their digital experience, some brands and businesses are now betting on Direct-to-Avatar (D2A) shopping experiences, too. Virtual reality and the avatar economy are emerging as a new model for communication and retail that allows brands to bridge the gap between the physical and digital worlds.
CDU: What role does VR and extended reality (XR) play in enabling these immersive experiences, and how do you see this technology evolving within the beauty industry?
EM: With technology now an integral part of consumers’ lives, augmented reality and virtual reality experiences are becoming increasingly popular. The importance of AR, VR technologies, and AI have undoubtedly entered everyday beauty routines, with brands taking new steps to offer more personalized, creative, and immersive experiences.
3D artistry and digital beauty are shaping the future of beauty and unlocking unlimited possibilities for consumer-brand interactions and for products, specifically for hyper-realistic digital realms. These experimentations encourage people to have fun with their image, play with their appearance, and push the limits of self-expression as they experiment with both fantastical or realistic beauty trends in the virtual world.
The development of Web3 and the acceleration of the “beautyverse” are spurring consumers’ desire for digital experimentation. In this era of digital engagement and experiences, brands map out strategies and products for building their presence in virtual worlds and interacting with consumers, in particular Gen Z and Alpha, who seamlessly transition between the real and virtual worlds.
This has accelerated the development of mixed-reality experiences and opened up the door to new beauty frontiers that cater to consumers’ digital appetites. Brands use digital twin technology to build realistic avatars that look exactly like their owners, from skin tone to eye color, and offer immersive experiences in which consumers can try different products at their leisure in the metaverse, see immediately what they look like, and shop in a virtual store the same way they would in a physical retail space.
A mixed-reality environment that blurs the lines between digital, fantasy, and reality will reshape the future of beauty, opening up new ways of consuming beauty where the IRL and digital selves coexist. 3D, AR, VR, and computer vision technologies will allow consumers to experiment with their visual identity, be it a physical or a virtual one, and to express different aspects of themselves on different platforms.
CDU: How can brands balance the implementation of multi-sensorial storytelling while maintaining authenticity and brand identity?
EM: Striking the right balance between human touch and digital interactions is one of the main challenges in customer experience. It appears that while some sectors of society want to find refuge in a digital world, others are committed to reconnecting with the physical world and find that to be a salve.
Therefore, brands need to bank on tech’s ability and be mindful to include the human and the need for human connections. In this context, multi-sensorial storytelling can help brands connect with their consumers on a more emotional level, stimulate deeper-feel brand experiences, transcend the brand message, encourage interactivity and entertainment, and create immersive and tech-driven experiences while heightening the honesty of their brand personality and image.
CDU: The interplay between fragrance and color is noted as a key element in shaping consumer perception. How can brands effectively harness this connection to enhance product appeal?
EM: Research demonstrates that functional scents and emotion-inspiring colors can contribute to well-being, and indeed, how the brain often links the information perceived by smell and sight. Colors, warm or cool, influence the mind and body and trigger emotional responses, while fragrances have significant, measurable effects on mood.
Therefore, exploring how color and scent can elicit physical, emotional, and mental reactions is particularly relevant for brands to help consumers elevate their mood and create an inviting home ambience. Brands can design home care fragrances that shift from their traditionally utilitarian focus to a category that creates a distinctive ambiance via scent and color and by stimulating specific emotions.
Brands could create a collection of home fragrances highlighting the interplay of colors and scents to evoke certain moods and emotions. This collection of wellness-oriented scents could be designed for the uniqueness of each home space – spanning the kitchen, wardrobe, home office, and pet area – and leverage the color and scent combo to enhance well-being and create a welcoming and memorable atmosphere.
CDU: Cultural differences impact how people associate scents with colors. Can you share any examples of how global beauty brands are adapting their products based on regional sensory preferences?
EM: While the beauty industry has become more inclusive in make-up, hair care, and even skin care, the perfumery category still stays behind. It’s true that the fragrance industry uses refined ingredients from all over the world, but the fragrances are often designed with a lack of representation of local cultures and traditions.
This has led to the emergence of a new generation of BIPOC perfumers and brands who want to decolonize how we smell with scents that are more inclusive and authentic and pay tribute to local and regional identity values and cultural preferences.
In an increasingly mixed and multicultural world, perfume brands will need to take into consideration cultural sensibilities, civilizations’ histories, and religious traditions to develop scents adapted to regional and local sensory and psychological preferences to foster an emotional connection with their consumers worldwide and stay relevant in diverse markets.
CDU: With personalized beauty on the rise, do you foresee a future where fragrance and color experiences are tailored to individual consumer emotions and psychological profiles?
EM: Artificial intelligence is enhancing discovery and experimentation in the world of scent, redefining the connection between fragrance and human emotion, and taking personalization to a whole new level. AI-driven fragrance personalization is capturing the attention of consumers who are seeking unique perfumes that resonate with their individual identities.
AI-powered systems, machine learning technology, data science, and advanced algorithms can enhance scent experiences and digitize the sense of smell by analyzing consumers’ personalities, moods, preferences, and tastes. This allows AI to generate curated, personalized recommendations, transforming the way consumers explore the world of perfume and shop for their ideal fragrance.
Brands will be able to use the potential of advanced technologies to reimagine the fragrance discovery process and offer personalized fragrances based on a combination of personal data and AI predictions alongside AI-guided scent creation platforms and machines. The fragrance industry is also increasingly granting space to digitization.
The revolution of the Metaverse offers new growth prospects for brands, enabling them to provide their consumers with highly immersive and engaging digital experiences. Increased investment in olfactory research and technology should help perfumers to explore the composition of new scent experience applications.
It will also help brands to design experiences that bridge the physical, digital, and sensory worlds and that inspire connection, wellness, and new ways of experiencing scent.
CDU: The report discusses thermo-haptic formulations in skin care, cosmetics, and hair care. What are some standout innovations in this space that beauty manufacturers should be paying attention to?
EM: Today, the beauty routine is far more than just a functional step in our day-to-day lives. Products are no longer just aimed at external beauty but also help support our personal well-being.
Haptic and sensory experiences are becoming an integral part of the beauty routine, with factors such as fragrances and textures at the forefront. Exploring the use of thermochromic pigments opens up possibilities for interactive textures that respond to temperature changes.
The use of photochromic pigments can unlock interactive and visually captivating products that respond to UV or blue lights. Going further, investigating chromosonic materials, which are sensitive to sound and touch, could offer fun, engaging, and multi-sensory experiences.
Memory shape polymers, meanwhile, are materials that change their shape in response to first stimuli and then recover their original state in response to different external stimuli, such as heat or light. These materials could provide an interesting opportunity to create disruptive products that incorporate transformative properties.
To further explore new ways of interaction between beauty products and users, biometric sensing technology will, in the future, open new possibilities to create textures, masks, patches, pads, and more that react to a user’s emotional state, with changes in their colors, patterns, and textures.
CDU: How do temperature-responsive and texture-adaptive formulations impact consumer satisfaction, and what challenges exist in formulating these products?
EM: Texture is key when consumers are selecting beauty products, and the sensory properties of a product can trigger strong emotional feelings. This means it is vital for brands to reinvent and elevate their products’ sensorial properties continually.
Temperature-responsive and texture-adaptive formulations, with a unique ability to change properties in response to external stimuli, have gained strong interest in the beauty industry. Using smart materials has opened up new paths for the development of beauty products that offer personalized and adaptive benefits while enhancing user experience and efficacy.
Beauty formulas that are activated by a consumer’s environmental surroundings provide targeted benefits and improve the performance of the products. Shifting attitudes toward wellness and self-care are creating momentum and demand for sensory beauty routines that promote physical and emotional comfort.
In this context, smart textures offering multi-sensory experiences become key to connecting the product to the consumer in an engaging way and boasting sensorial benefits. In packaging, exploring new possibilities of tactile expression enriches the consumer experience by introducing an additional dimension strictly related to touch.
The aim is to stimulate sensations, creating a sensory encounter that transcends traditional packaging norms. Through the fusion of tactile exploration and technological integration, the packaging strives to redefine the boundaries of sensory engagement in product interaction.