Phantom Senses
Why sensory cues trigger phantom tastes and textures in the brain, and how to use grounded cognition to boost product desire.
In this issue
Marketing is the only job where “I was just on TikTok for three hours” is technically research.
You’re welcome for the permission slip. Anyway, today we put that research to work with Phantom Senses.
Reading time: 5 minutes, 02 seconds
What if doing nothing beat 90% of professional fund managers?
The investment industry sells complexity. Research. Timing. Alpha.
The data tells a different story. Over any 20-year period, a simple world index fund has outperformed more than 90% of professionals. Most investors who try to beat the market end up paying more in fees to underperform it.
The edge isn’t intelligence. It’s patience.
But patience is hard when your portfolio feels abstract. A passive fund is just a ticker on a screen. The thousands of companies inside it, the businesses you actually co-own, stay invisible.
90 Percent fixes that. Every week, it pulls one company at random from the world equity index and tells you what it actually does.
- The Brazilian company that makes the electric motors inside almost everything that spins.
- The Florida company that sells your airline its spare parts at half the price.
- The Japanese hardware company hiding inside every factory.
One company. Every week. Yours to discover.
We want you to do something now.
Picture yourself going into the kitchen, grabbing a lemon, and slowly biting it.
We bet you already feel the sour hit, the wince, the flood of saliva. All from a sentence; nothing touched your tongue.
That phantom taste is the brain doing its favorite trick—filling in senses that nature didn’t deliver.
Phantom Senses are sensations the mind manufactures from cues alone, without needing actual stimulus.
Researchers call it grounded cognition: thinking by quietly re-running the body’s own sensory machinery.
In one study, orienting a product toward a viewer’s dominant hand lifted purchase intent.
The brain mentally grabbed it, and the body followed.
Read crisp, silky, or sizzling, and the sensory cortex partly fires as if the texture were real.
Science claims it shapes flavor, too: richer sensory copy makes food seem to taste better.
It happens everywhere. The phantom buzz of a phone that never rang, warmth radiating off a sunlit photo. A menu, not a meal, starts the craving.
Our take: no product needs to be in someone’s hands for the brain to put it there.
Here are three ways to conjure senses from pixels and prose.
Three ways to leverage Phantom Sense
Sell the scent you can’t smell
Online candle shoppers can’t smell anything. But Otherland turned that wall into a window.
The brand sells fragrance through evocative names and lush, art-directed imagery instead.
Names like Daybed and Tomato Terrazo don’t list ingredients, but instead stage a scene the nose finishes on its own.
Each collection wraps a scent in a visual story built with a different artist, so the eyes deliver an aroma the package never could.
It works: customers average nearly three purchases a year without ever smelling the product first.
Pure Phantom Sense. Vivid cues prompt the brain to simulate a smell that isn’t there, and to crave it.
Let buyers drive before they buy
A product video shows software working. An interactive demo lets the prospect work it: clicking, typing, navigating a clickable replica.
That hands-on rehearsal is embodied simulation in action. The brain treats almost using it as a phantom version of owning it.
Onboarding platform Trainual ran the test directly: an interactive demo versus its existing product-tour video.
The clickable version drove a 450% lift in free-trial signups, plus a 175% lift in visitors converting to paid.
Passive viewing informs. Simulated use makes the product feel already theirs and that feeling is what converts.
Don’t pull the straw out of the orange
Phantom senses cut both ways. Remove the cue, and the imagined experience leaves with it.
For decades, Tropicana’s carton showed an orange pierced by a straw. An open invitation to taste fresh juice straight from the fruit.
The 2009 redesign swapped that for a flat glass of juice and a modern logo.
Gone was the straw in the orange, the single image that made the brain rehearse the sip.
Within two months, sales fell roughly 20%, to about $30 million. And Tropicana scrambled back to the old carton.
The orange-and-straw was the phantom-taste trigger, and dropping it quietly turned premium into generic.
Write funny content in minutes a day.
Every day, you stumble across boring content.
The kind that feels like getting stabbed in the eye. With a plastic fork. Dipped in Absolut Vodka.
The cold, harsh truth? Boring content kills sales.
The good news? You’re not boring. You just need better inspiration.
That’s what this free newsletter is for.
Inside, you’ll find some of the funniest, sharpest, most effective writing on the internet.
Every weekday, you’ll get one funny example, plus a quick breakdown of exactly why it works. You’ll read, laugh, steal a few ideas, and write content that gets more attention.
And more sales.
AI SEARCH: Few brands are throwing cash at paid AI search ads yet, though WPP calls it the fastest-growing channel around. Money is moving within organic instead, with content and creator budgets reworked to earn citations within LLMs, while attribution remains fuzzy.
MARKETING:Stop hiding your goods behind opaque cardboard. New study insights reveal that transparent packaging makes shoppers four times more likely to choose your product because it triggers instant psychological ownership. Let them see what they’re buying and they will.
TIKTOK: A new Symphony Agent builds whole video campaigns from a single text prompt. It reads what’s already trending in-app and works from there. Feed it cues, images, or example videos, and it serves up similar high-performers you can riff on. Worth a try.
ICYMI, last time we looked at the Anticipation Effect.
The “Now you feel it” Crew.
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