The idea is highly intriguing. The social anthropologist Ashley Montagu viewed touch as a language of its own — one that is learned well before writing and speech. With its extremely large vocabulary, Montagu argued that touch is capable of conveying what cannot be transmitted through more formal language, because the language of touch is completely natural, and without any artifice.
Tactile sensations could presumably be experienced as sub-cultural so long as the sensations are identified at the perceptual level of cold, smooth, fuzzy, etc. Consider the classic, contoured Coca-Cola bottle. The bottle was designed approximately 90 years ago to satisfy the request of an American bottler for a soft-drink container that could be identified by touch even in the dark. The Coke bottle was not encumbered with a lot of text, and the color scheme was universal. The tactile encounter with the bottle conveyed a sense of pleasure across multiple cultures — though the associations the bottle evoked (e.g., hoop skirt, cocoa bean) no doubt differed from culture to culture.
The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung believed that human beings can be categorized based on how they perceive objects and on the way they make value judgments about those objects. Perception, he argued, can be either conscious or unconscious, while judgments tend to be based on either feeling or thinking. Jung's characterizations of perception and judgment have the advantage of being sub-cultural, and in that sense might be expected to have global applicability.
The Coke bottle's experience notwithstanding, tactile sensations have largely been neglected as a component of marketing strategies. In 1994 brand strategist Paul Southgate wrote, "[T]here are very few occasions during a typical day when you become consciously aware of the sense of touch. Most people can recall with reasonable accuracy an enormous number of things they have seen during the course of a normal day, or things they have heard. But things they have touched? Only at the extremes of experience... do we become consciously aware of the sense of touch" (Total Branding by Design, Kogan Page, 1994).
Southgate went on to argue that the sense of touch was one of the last uncharted frontiers for marketing. He further predicted that packages of the future would increasingly make appeals to our sense of touch. But a decade later, Richard Gerstman, chairman emeritus of Interbrand US and co-author of The Visionary Package (Palgrave, 2005), continues to find few examples of packages that provide tactile sensations that address consumers at a conscious level. Says Gerstman, "[Southgate's] idea is good and should be recommended by designers, but few producers, with the exception of cosmetics, are willing to spend the money for unique structures."
Containers for cosmetics — and in particular for fragrances — tend to make conscious tactile appeals to the consumer. Modern perfume bottles come in all shapes and sizes but, like the containers of antiquity, most are made of glass. Handling an elegant sculpted glass container provides the consumer with a sense of luxury that does not come across in the same way with more modern materials, although the latter can actually assume more shapes and textures. The pronounced ability of glass to retain subtle essences coupled with its long association in the human psyche with high quality has provided little motivation for the perfume industry to replace it with less traditional materials.
Consider Nina Ricci's L'Air du Temps perfume. First introduced in 1948, the fragrance came in a Lalique crystal bottle with a stopper capped by a pair of crystal lovebirds. According to Gerstman, it was the tactile encounter with this bottle that conveyed the immediate sense of the high quality of the perfume. The elegance of this bottle assured the purchaser — perhaps an awkward suitor with little experience at the perfume counter — that the fragrance was top-of-the-line. Why would anyone, the buyer might well reason, put anything second-rate in such a beautiful container? The decision to purchase the fragrance could be made consciously, based on a deliberate and thoughtful analysis of the package's merits. Such a response would be an example of conscious perception, followed by thinking judgment.
By contrast, the abstract glass bottle for Calvin Klein's more contemporary fragrance Euphoria seems designed to appeal more to feeling. The futuristic container has a partially metallized appearance, but an inquiring touch reveals that it is, reassuringly, actually made of glass (an example of conscious perception, followed by feeling judgment). As in the case of the L'Air du Temps fragrance, the decision to purchase Euphoria may be deliberate.
Given the strong sensual overtones of fine fragrances, it is not surprising that most purchases of perfume tend to be made at the store, not online. Says perfume designer Marc Rosen of New York, "Most people wouldn't buy fine perfume on the Internet. It's rarely done. Almost never." But consumers do not often buy toiletries online either. And although they do not approach the purchase of toiletries with anywhere near the deliberation — or desire for total sensual experience — that they bring to buying a fine fragrance, they nevertheless still want to touch the package before making a purchase.
Unlike encounters with perfume containers, tactile encounters with toiletry packages tend to be unconscious. These packages typically do not undergo much conscious scrutiny, unless the package makes an outright appeal to ergonomics — for example, a new design for dispensing shaving cream. But tactile cues are still present, even if they are only experienced when the shopper places a toiletry package in the shopping basket.
That these cues tend to be subliminal is consistent with the materials used to package toiletries. Not being limited to glass containers, packages for toiletries can take advantage of the subtle properties of a variety of modern materials. Says Gerstman, "The toiletry category sometimes uses appealing materials, such as deep drawn aluminum containers, matte and pearlized plastics. Packages in several categories use shapes that conform to being held in the hand. There are many textures and finishes that can be molded into polypropylene and polystyrene bottles, which would help to make them 'more sensual.' "
Professor Daniel Goodwin, who teaches packaging science at Rochester Institute of Technology, notes that a sort of synesthesia can sometimes be achieved with modern plastics technologies. According to Goodwin, the addition of pearlescent coloring to an oriented plastic film allowed one hand soap manufacturer to create an artificial tactile sensation. "You could almost feel the slipperiness of the bar of soap through the wrapper by virtue of the way it looked with that material, the high gloss and the pearlescent coloring," he says. "It looked slippery even though you weren't actually touching the bar of soap."
Most packages for toiletries in the US tend to have either a soft, smooth feel that may evoke passive feelings, or sharp, boxy edges that may evoke passive thinking. The response to the former tends to be more like falling in love (unconscious perception, feeling judgment) than loving (conscious perception, feeling judgment). Passive thinking, on the other hand, tends to be more undirected (unconscious perception, thinking judgment) than critical (conscious perception, thinking judgment).
Interestingly, there have been many attempts to classify packages in terms of their gender, i.e., according to their masculine and feminine traits. Smooth packages are said to be feminine; those with sharp edges are labeled masculine. But these characterizations run the risk of being limited by cultural bias. By contrast, the four Jungian perception-judgment categories would seem to have more cross-cultural applications.
But is touch really a global language? Martin Lindstrom, author of Brand Sense (The Free Press, 2005), has his doubts. Says Lindstrom, "There is no doubt that a selected few of our five basic senses represents a global language." But noting the vast differences in the ways people respond to some sensory input across cultures, Lindstrom adds, "[We] might talk about a global language — but only representing very few 'words.' " Clearly if tactile experience is to serve as a universal branding language, it will have to be experienced as the real thing.
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