Sensory Restoration: Rebuilding Consumer Trust in Brands
Background
In Jean Baudrillard’s The Consumer Society,
what people consume is not the use-value of an object, but the symbolic meaning behind it. Brands turn products into symbols through advertising, storytelling, and packaging.
This means consumers aren’t buying the product itself. They’re buying the meaning the brand has assigned to it.
But when brands all pursue what Byung-Chul Han calls “the smooth” —
without edges, without resistance, without depth.
They start to look increasingly identical. The distinguishing function of the symbol begins to fail. Consumers can no longer tell which is better just by looking. Good visuals can still attract attention, but what consumers actually care about most when shopping now is the product itself.
An iiMedia Research report confirms this. Although over 90% of consumers believe a product’s appearance significantly influences their purchasing decisions, what they care about most at this stage are ingredients, efficacy, and brands. Brands can say “my product is good,” but consumers cannot verify that before buying. As a result, social media, an ostensibly objective third party, has become an increasingly important channel for consumers to learn about products. A McKinsey report notes that new consumer groups rely more heavily on AI assistants, and those assistants’ judgments, in turn, depend on what brands post on social media.
But here’s the catch. Influencer reviews are also turning into a mouthpiece for brands rather than an objective reference. When the judgment criteria from both brands and influencers start to be questioned, consumers naturally care more about their own firsthand experience — testing things out themselves to see if a product is worth buying. This also explains why today’s consumers focus more on the product itself rather than on brand marketing.
But testing things out means a longer purchase cycle and higher decision-making costs. They need to spend more time and energy on trial and error. So at this point, price becomes the easier filter. Taobao’s discount strategy has become simpler than before, and shopping festivals have shifted from specific dates to year-round events. Meanwhile, PDD, a platform focused on low prices, has seen its sales grow year after year in its financial reports, which further confirms this trend.
But a Nielsen report points out that consumers are still willing to pay for quality in products that genuinely improve their lives — Health and beauty and fresh food are growing. At the same time, they’re more willing to allocate their budget to real experiences that provide emotional returns, as evidenced by the growth of pet food.
So consumers today aren’t indifferent to quality. They just don’t have the old ways of judging whether a product is good anymore. They need a new way to see the value of the product itself more directly. And that’s what Sensory Restoration is meant to address.
The Core of the Framework
The Sensory Restoration framework is designed precisely for these products. Its core is: Where consumers are willing to pay for quality and emotion, create the conditions for their feelings to occur through visual means rather than one-sided preaching from the brand. At the same time, it allows consumers to see the value that corresponds to the price.
Consumer Numbness to Formulaic Marketing
As an extension of “smooth aesthetics,” I want to introduce a concept first: industrial saccharin. Just like eating too much sugar makes you sick of it, the “emotional value” many brands manufacture today feels like using a proven formula to mass-produce 感动 (being moved), longing, and a sense of belonging. This approach used to work, but now consumers have tasted it too many times. They’ve started to easily recognize the purpose behind these brand expressions.
This kind of empathy appears as if the brand understands the consumer, but there’s an obvious disconnect between it and the actual product in hand. The brand uses empathy to create an expectation of “I get you,” but the product doesn’t catch it. Consumers think they’re buying the feeling of “being understood,” only to find it’s just an ordinary product when it arrives. Over time, consumers don’t just become numb to this kind of expression, and they also lose trust in the brand.
The Sensory Restoration Framework
1. Making Product Value Visible
Brands used to assign value to products through advertising, celebrity endorsements, and other means. But in a market where consumers value products more, what’s missing is actually a product-centric standard for judgment. As a packaging designer, I work with both brands and manufacturers. What I see is exactly this: A product’s value isn’t unilaterally assigned by the brand; it comes from the efforts of multiple parties. And a product’s value comes precisely from these efforts.
Consumers may not be able to empathize with the brand, but when faced with the thousands of workers doing the same work as them, it can still trigger consumer empathy.
So the first step of Sensory Restoration is to make the birth of the product visible.
Factory Diaries
The most intuitive place to record the birth of a product is the factory. However, don’t be overly polished. Overly embellished visuals become “industrial saccharin”. Consumers perceive the “sugar,” not the effort the brand put into the product. But also don’t try to show how hard the work is by highlighting the workers’ exhaustion. The core function of factory diaries is to record, not to display.
Reference scenarios: raw material sourcing (for ingredient-focused products), discarded versions during sampling, real scenes of communicating with workers, production details (can be skipped if confidential), rejected defective products during quality checks, etc.
Office Diaries
Factory diaries only cover production. But the conception, creativity, selling points, and sales of a product, the front-end and back-end work, happen in the workplace. This is also why I say don’t overemphasize the workers’ hardship. Before a product reaches the consumer, it goes through communication, coordination, and testing across many departments. Everyone who worked hard for the product deserves to be recorded.
Reference scenarios: the process of proposing, revising, or even scrapping a plan; testing different sample versions; testing the final product; following up on production at the factory; customer service conversations with consumers; shipping details, etc.
Display channels
social media, brand cards, inside product packaging or on product labels, etc.
Notes
Factory diaries and office diaries work together, not as two separate parts. Raw material selection, production follow-up, quality checks, these are all scenes of the brand and manufacturer working together. When presenting, pay attention to the method. Avoid words that deliberately emphasize workload; just restore the real process of how the product was born, and leave the rest to the consumer’s judgment.
Advantages
The brand shows exactly as much as it does, using concrete scenes to support the abstract concept of value; highly executable, no need for deliberate staging or posing, low promotional cost.
Limitations
Requires coordination across multiple departments; conversion rates are hard to quantify like brand advertising or paid traffic. The bigger risk is that some consumers may not buy it, thinking these are things the brand should be doing anyway.
2. Bringing the Product into Life
Factory diaries and office diaries reveal the value of the product. But this alone is not the key to making consumers click “buy.” Because consumers don’t just pay for “you worked hard”. They pay because “this thing is useful to me.”
In an era of extreme abundance, consumer needs don’t need to be manufactured. They need to be met.
In other words, what truly drives a purchase is whether the product is relevant to the consumer’s needs. So this part focuses on stepping into the consumer’s shoes: bringing the product into their real lives and showing real scenes of use.
I’ll use the concept design for Hongwei as an example, because Sensory Restoration was born from it. For a detailed design breakdown, see my portfolio on Behance. In the next piece, I’ll focus on how creators can use this framework to coexist with AI. This article focuses on the underlying logic.
Hongwei is a brand from my hometown. Its star product is a sheep tallow soap, made with raw materials from the grasslands. The product wants consumers to feel “natural,” so I brought the consumer to the grasslands to feel that natural quality.
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I just put the product in the grasslands. In an earlier version, I did exactly that. But the grasslands ended up being just a backdrop, and the product felt heavily staged. It looked good visually, but it didn’t enter my life. In other words, I didn’t feel like this product had anything to do with me.
So in the final version, I started from my own life. What would this soap look like in my daily routine? What would the packaging look like on the grasslands? That was the birth of Hongwei. And that’s what I want to explore: how to approach this from the consumer’s perspective.
To be clear: Sensory Restoration here is not about restoring the grasslands. It’s about restoring how I actually feel when I use the soap.
Applying this to more categories: Take color cosmetics. The market is shrinking because consumers’ demand for makeup has decreased. But in my observation, people still use makeup in most social situations. So the visual presentation of cosmetics should focus on which makeup looks correspond to which social scenarios.
Take pet food, which is growing. Its visuals should focus on scenes of pets eating and the satisfaction and joy afterward. Because a happy pet naturally satisfies the owner’s emotional needs. If it only shows clean ingredients, it abandons the natural advantage of the pet economy as part of the emotion economy.
Notes
01
The core function of this part is to let the product meet the needs that arise in the consumer’s life — to make consumers feel the brand is here to help them, not to assign extra value to the product that doesn’t belong to it. The product’s intrinsic value is shown in the first part. These two parts work together to demonstrate both product value and use value.
02
Product usage scenes should be relevant to life, but this doesn’t mean forcing brands into a daily grind of mundane routines. Life takes many forms; it’s just that the vivid moments often need to be rediscovered. Think about why Friends ran for ten seasons and still captivates people today. It shows the daily lives of a few ordinary young people, but those dramatic coincidences are exactly the amplification of real-life situations. As long as it fits the product’s usage logic, moderate exaggeration and playfulness are fine. Brands don’t need to disguise themselves as flawless showrooms, but they also shouldn’t resort to gimmicks for attention. If the content steals the show, consumers’ attention shifts away from the product.
03
More importantly, build a sense of immersion. Don’t lead with the product. If the camera shoves the product in the viewer’s face right away, or the entire scene revolves around it, the scene’s functional attribute diminishes, and it becomes one-sided preaching from the brand again. True scenography starts with a specific life trigger, like the relaxation of curling up on the couch binge-watching on a weekend, or the slight buzz of a small gathering with friends at night. Let the product appear naturally, as part of life, not as the absolute protagonist of the frame.
When consumers see “Isn’t this me?” instead of “This person is selling to me,” their guard turns into resonance and understanding. Because today’s consumers are tired of the salesman shouting about how great the product is. What they really need is a quiet listener who consistently supports their life.
04
The audience for the product and brand needs to be clear. One scene targets one type of consumer. Start by serving the group with a strong need for the product, building word-of-mouth and brand trust.
Advantages and Limitations Are Equally Obvious
By showing more real-life scenes, the product becomes part of the consumer’s life and is strongly tied to their needs. Meeting needs is, in a way, an indirect way of meeting consumers’ emotional needs. This places higher demands on product quality and requires brands to pay more attention to the product itself. Because if the product can’t support the high expectations the brand evokes, it will have an even more negative impact on consumer trust and product repurchase.
Where This Framework Applies
This framework applies to categories where the value of a product is completed through the consumer’s experience of using it.
Category 1: Lifestyle goods with a demand for quality
Consumers buying these products care not only about basic function, but also about whether the product is safe, healthy, and capable of delivering a better experience.
Examples: Premium personal and home care products (high-end tissues, baby wipes), organic foods, functional products (high-end skincare), etc.
Category 2: Emotion-driven products
Consumers are primarily purchasing a “feeling” or “emotional value.”
Examples: Fragrance and its derivatives, pet-related products, handmade goods, etc.
Category 3: Function-driven products
The purchase decision relies on whether it feels comfortable to use. While these products inherently come with usage scenarios, their current visual presentation often relies on stark white-background shots or someone else’s user experience.
Examples: Ergonomic furniture, bedding, office supplies, etc.
Category 4: Culture/Region-driven products
Consumers are buying a sense of “belonging” or an expression of “unique identity.” The value of these products lies in their cultural narrative and regional provenance.
Examples: Specialties with strong regional cultural symbols, cultural creative products, intangible cultural heritage crafts.
Categories NOT suitable:
Products that primarily rely on visuals or low prices to stimulate quick purchases.
Most daily necessities fall here. They operate on thin margins and high volume, and consumers don’t invest much energy into choosing them.
Notes
01
Sensory Restoration is not a brand culture in itself. Rather, it is a comprehensive visual showcase of brand culture. If a brand truly has a culture of “valuing quality” or “humanistic care,” this framework will make that culture visible.
02
This framework is currently based more on logical deduction and local observation. It needs brands that are genuinely willing to try it out to prove it works. But that is exactly its opportunity — It is cheap, lightweight, and has a low cost of trial and error.
Advantages
In the face of rigid laws and regulations, brands still have room to maneuver. And for brands that are product-focused but haven’t yet built brand equity or mass word-of-mouth, the promotional cost is relatively low.
Limitations
At this stage, there is a lack of real-world case studies and data to confirm whether it will truly help brands.
Afterword — What This Framework Can Bring Us
Despite many voices saying the consumer market is shrinking, spending on travel, service experiences, and personal growth is actually growing. When I look at social media, although a lot of content is criticized as “traffic-driven” or “fast-food,” what I see is the awakening of individual consciousness. Everyone is making their voice heard.
In an era of extreme material abundance, the pursuit of spiritual fulfillment is becoming a strong need. At the same time, with the decline of meritocracy, external evaluation systems no longer support people in seeking validation from the outside. So people are turning their attention back to themselves. They are taking a more cautious attitude toward external evaluation systems like brand marketing, and when buying products, their priority is whether it meets their own needs.
When people start pursuing spiritual fulfillment, objects are no longer just cold consumables. They become projections of personal emotions and lifestyles. People buy a product to satisfy their need for quality or emotion, essentially treating it as part of their spiritual world.
Therefore, the Sensory Restoration framework is proposed in response to this current market shift. At a time when product value is being re-evaluated by the market, this framework not only showcases product value, but also prompts brands to re-evaluate their pricing systems. When value is seen, the power over price is actually handed back to the consumer. But this time, what they accept is no longer just a final result. It is a standard they spontaneously form after seeing the process.
So, this framework is not fighting against the low-price trend. Instead, it allows brands to set prices within a more reasonable scope and gives them the confidence not to engage in vicious price wars. At the same time, it hopes to provide a viable, low-cost method for brands that genuinely want to make good products. If you can’t afford to invest more in prettier visuals, then why not show the real part?
When prices are reasonable, companies earn reasonable profits, which allows them to continue making good products and paying employees well, thereby driving further consumption.
Perhaps my wish is too grand, and this framework only addresses consumption, a seemingly everyday issue. However, just like the scene in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri: Although the shrinking consumer market is not the “culprit,” when so many problems are linked to the market, let’s face this problem together first. Rather than letting the mother who lost her child become a new perpetrator, or the sheriff who upholds justice become a new victim.
In this crisis of trust in the consumer market, if everyone just blames each other, there are no winners in the end. Sensory Restoration is my attempt to help both sides put down their opposition and rebuild a dialogue. After all, buyers and sellers were never meant to be in opposition. Brands produce what consumers need; consumers buy what they need.
It’s just that the way we communicate needs to change.
