This chapter aims to position the sense of touch within the consumption context. The authors first define the sense of touch from cultural , sociological, psychological , and marketing perspectives. The authors provide an overview of the academic research of “what is touching” and explain its characteristics —i.e. “how do we touch”. Then the authors show the explicit and implicit influence the sense of touch has on our perceptual system and mind—i.e. information processing . At the end of the chapter, the authors expose how it influences consumers’ direct experience of product in store environments .
1.1 The Sense of Touch
Touch is a fascinating sense since, without it, human beings would hardly live in the environment . Without the sense of touch, one would have greater difficulties to understand the world, connect to others, and simply move along this same environment. As a matter of fact, the sense of touch is also the first to develop during the process of becoming a small and fresh cute, or not, newborn. As such, Montagu (1971) deeply demonstrates how it enables any human to perceive the world from the very beginning of life to its end. While being in the mother’s wombs, a newborn can feel and perceive tactile sensations related to what is surrounding him. Touch is also the life longest sense to be efficient when the visual , auditory, olfactory and gustatory system tends to decrease drastically and rapidly after a certain age .
The sense of touch is defined by several components that consist of structural and psychophysical characteristics but also by one’s culture and social environment that deeply influence , in the long term, tactile apprehension and its development. For instance, medical research early showed that nursing newborn by holding them regularly enables the tactile system to better develop with finer dimensions than rarely being in contact (Reite 1990). In line with it, Harry Harlow’s 1 controversial research demonstrated the importance of tactile dimension in babies’ development: a small baby monkey rather preferred being surrounded by a wired mother having warm tactile clothes than a wired mother without these tactile cues but enabling feeding. In his attempt to understand the nature of love, his experiments showed that tactile need is deeper and stronger than apparently vital elements.
On a psychological side, touch can provide long-term benefits such as healing or reducing stress compared to barely tactile behaviour that turns out to increase depressive and negative overall thinking behaviour (Field 1998). As a matter of fact, what needs to be kept in mind is the broad influence that touch has on the definition of our existence , and by such, how deep it defines our attitude , emotions and behaviour .
1.1.1 Social and Cultural Dimensions
Literal definition of the action of “touching” refers to “putting one’s hand in contact with something or somebody to appreciate its state, consistency, warmth, etc.” (Le Petit Larousse Illustré 2010, p. 1020; Encyclopédie Bordas) while the name “Touch ” refers to the sense that enables physical perception of objects, pressure, cold and warmth, through skin contact. These definitions consider several orders: physical (enter in contact), relational (reach out, communicate), and introspective (affect, feeling ). Touching the environment and our surroundings enables to have a conscious understanding that we are not alone but also that we are part of a greater ensemble (Ackerman 1990; Montagu 1971). As such, touch , among the other senses , acts as a mediator of our perception of the environment , and more specifically, touch is the sense dedicated to exploration and openness to the world. Indeed, the sense of touch is a door to the world that demonstrates the tangibility of what is captured by the visual , auditory, olfactory and gustatory systems (Klatzky et al. 1985).
Historically, the sense of touch has been considered and treated as the most primitive sense (Gregory 1967). Yet being the most developed sense from our birth to death (Hertenstein et al. 2006), it is also our finest sense with multiple faces that are hard to verbalise into simple words (Krishna 2010). As such, touch helps to understand and create concreteness but also to conceptualise with finer details (Serino and Haggard 2010). Besides, research from various fields has come to a consensus to situate the first exploration of the sense in the Aristotle era (Jütte 2008, p. 3). However, origins of the integration of touch as a main sense, being at the centre of everything, are located in India and China where religious and medicinal knowledges were based on tactile sensation and perception (for a historical review, see Grundwald 2008; Parisi 2018). Yet Western countries remained for a long time attached to ...