Emotional Contagion
The Invisible Pull and how Emotional Contagion shapes Brand Experiences
Emotional contagion is the invisible current that passes between people, the way moods spread without a single word. In face-to-face settings, it’s often explained through mirror neurons, the brain’s subtle mimicking engine. But in brand and spatial experience, it’s more elusive, transmitted through energy, rhythm, temperature. You feel the intent before you consciously understand it.
This is the limbic layer of brand experience, below logos and messaging, beneath the surface of strategy. It’s what happens before cognition kicks in.
The Primal Signals of Brand
When we think about branding, the emphasis is often on expression: visuals, taglines, touchpoints. But the earliest layers of brand perception happen somatically. It’s in the scent, temperature, tone of voice, texture, all of which activate the limbic system, the brain’s emotional core, before logic or language come into play.There’s a direct line between this and the conversation we had with Chris at SPX. He spoke about passive brand experience, how certain environments infer feelings not through signage or slogans, but through mood. The materiality of a space, the softness of lighting, the grain of a surface, the ambient sound, all contribute to a kind of emotional temperature.
“You don’t notice it directly,” Chris said, “but your body does.”
This is emotional contagion not as performance, but as presence. The sum of subtle signals that land in the body first. We call it a “gut feeling,” but it’s really a sensory verdict, the brain rationalises only after the body has already decided.
Atmospheric Credibility
This points to something crucial in contemporary brand experience: atmospheric credibility. It’s the sense that a brand “feels right” not because of what it says, but because of how it holds space. The coherence between material choices, sensory details, and emotional intent creates a kind of implicit trust.Think of it as the difference between a restaurant that announces “we care about quality” and one where the weight of the cutlery, the lighting temperature, and the acoustic dampening all whisper the same message without words. The latter doesn’t demand your attention, it earns your nervous system’s approval.
As researcher and brand theorist Caroline Till puts it: “We’re seeing a shift away from visual identity toward sensorial identity, one that invites emotional immersion rather than demands attention.”
This is cultural temperature rather than cultural communication, a well-designed environment doesn’t announce itself. It seeps and modulates the room’s emotional rhythm without needing a logo. This isn’t about decoration, it’s infrastructural.
Club Floors and Social Thermodynamics
Think about the feeling of being in a club or at a gig. The dense, human humidity of it, body odour, drinks, motion, maybe even drugs, creates a pheromonal fog of emotion. Not just music, but oneness. A shared frequency with everyone in the room. You’re inside a feeling more than a space.These aren’t just environmental effects, they’re social thermodynamics. Culture moves through bodies, chemically, visually, sonically. The air itself becomes conductive. The emotion’s felt in these spaces isn’t about persuasion and about surrender to a collective state.
This is the extreme end of the spectrum, but it reveals the mechanism. When sensory inputs align and intensify, individual emotional boundaries become porous. The question for brands is whether this same principle can operate at lower volumes, in retail environments, lobbies, digital interfaces, without tipping into manipulation.
Designing for Limbic Response
Across the trend reports we’ve dissected this year, a few common themes echo this deeper point: the rise of embodied emotion, especially amongst Gen Z, who favour experiences that move through the body, nature walks, dance, breathwork, over ones that are merely intellectual or expressive.This connects directly to atmospheric credibility. Brands that understand this aren’t decorating spaces, they’re calibrating them. Every material choice, every temperature adjustment, every sonic detail becomes a small emotional signal. In aggregate, they create what we might call a sensory proposition, the felt equivalent of a value proposition.
Let’s sidestep slightly from pheromones to scent and touch, the subtle ways the senses reinforce emotional connection. It’s like that memory of your favourite drink, not because the drink itself was extraordinary, but because of where you had it. A cold beer on a beach. A plastic cup at an ice hockey match. As Chris put it, you probably wouldn’t remember the brand, it was likely something basic, but the setting amplifies it. For that moment, it becomes the best beer ever and your body stores the emotional signature even when the details fade.
When Brands Live in Your Pocket
Even now, as brands are being distilled into apps in your digital wallet, icons, cards, tap-and-go utilities, the emotional layer hasn’t vanished. In fact, it’s becoming more strategic. As visual and verbal real estate shrinks, sensory branding swells in importance.Some corporations are mimicking fashion designers and luxury houses by hiring development firms to craft signature scents, atmospheric codes designed to trigger memory, recognition, and emotion. Just as Hermès maintains a house fragrance or Comme des Garçons builds identity through olfactory experiments, banks, airlines, and wellness startups are commissioning scent profiles that “feel like them”.
Take Singapore Airlines, for example. The brand uses a custom-made scent known as Stefan Floridian Waters, a soft, calming blend of rose, lavender and citrus, diffused through its cabins and worn by flight attendants as part of their uniform. It’s not just fragrance, it’s ambient trust. Passengers associate the scent with calm, care, and consistency, all before the seatbelt clicks.
“Scent is the only sense with a direct path to emotion and memory.” - Rachel Herz, neuroscientist and author of ‘The Scent of Desire’
This isn’t just about luxury. It’s about emotional compression, encoding feeling into the smallest possible interaction. Because when you can’t see or hear the brand, you can still smell it. And that sensory imprint often lingers far longer than any tagline.
But here’s the tension: as brands become increasingly dematerialised, living primarily as digital utilities, how does olfactory or haptic design translate? Some are experimenting with sonic branding, signature sounds for notifications or loading states. Others are exploring haptic feedback patterns, the vibration language of an app. These are the new territories of emotional contagion, translated into the only sensory channels a screen can access.
Can Emotional Contagion Be Designed?
This raises the essential question: can emotional contagion be designed, or only invited?It’s a subtle line, too much orchestration, and you drift into manipulation. Too little, and the experience dissolves into ambience with no weight. The sweet spot is coherence, when the sensory details, cultural tone, and material language all signal the same emotional intent. That’s when a brand doesn’t feel performed, but felt.
But coherence alone isn’t enough, there’s also the question of honesty. When the atmospheric signals contradict the actual experience, when the scent promises calm but the service delivers chaos, when the lighting suggests care but the interaction feels transactional, the dissonance registers immediately. Your body notices the lie before your mind can articulate it.
This is where emotional contagion becomes ethics. Because these techniques work. They bypass rational assessment and speak directly to the nervous system. The question isn’t whether they’re effective, it’s whether they’re truthful. A brand that uses sensory design to paper over fundamental failures isn’t creating emotional contagion, it’s performing emotional fraud.
The Body Gives the First Review
Maybe the next step is to get empirical. Start tracing your own physiological responses: Which environments make you feel calm? What sounds quicken your heart rate? How does lighting influence your breathing? What textures make you lean in or pull back?Because in the end, the body gives the first review, long before the mind starts writing one. Emotional contagion isn’t something that happens to us, it’s something we’re constantly reading, processing, and responding to. The brands that understand this aren’t just designing environments. They’re learning to speak the language your nervous system already knows.
Further Reading
How Scent Influences Emotion and Brand Perception – Harvard Business Review
The Role of Mirror Neurons in Empathy – Scientific American
Emotional by Design by Gregg Hoffman
When You Think About Your Credit Card, Does a Fragrance Come to Mind?