The

Sensational

Agency

in

Innovation

&

Brand

Here’s a new Senstory! Senstories are short, useful snippets of inspiration. This time all about Fonts & Consistency. And all the truly sensational things (think activations, think Growth) you can achieve, if you take the time. I think this is a textbook example. Hats off to Haribo!

Brands invest heavily in innovation, yet many products still fail to deliver, often because the sensory experience isn’t fully understood. Hence building strong sensory knowledge in-house can be highly beneficial, and that’s where the sensory consultancy service by Haystack Consulting comes in. Beyond measuring products, we help organizations build internal sensory capabilities, equipping teams with the skills, training, and tools to collect consistent, high-quality data, like robust sensory profiles that accurately describe how products look, smell, taste, and feel. With the right support, results become more than numbers, they become insights.

Scroll any feed and you’ll see them: trends neatly packaged, confidently named, often already halfway mainstream by the time they reach your screen. Useful? Sure. Enough? Not really. Because every trend sparks a counter-movement. A pushback. An opposite force quietly (or loudly) gaining momentum. And if you only look in one direction, you miss half the story. That’s where counter-trends come in.

This November, the Haystack team hit the stage in Utrecht and Bremen — two cities, two congresses, and a whole lot of sensory inspiration. From waffles to AI-driven insights, we shared stories about how research can feel more human, visual and connected.

How we learned, evolved, and unlocked their full potential. At Haystack, our ambition was simple: make qualitative research more agile, more inclusive of underrepresented voices, more scalable, and more accessible. That ambition sparked a journey. Today, that journey has led us to a powerful new capability: Virtual Audiences. But our way of working with Virtual Audiences did not fall into place instantly. It grew through curiosity, experimentation, and a great deal of learning. In this article, we take you along that learning curve, showing how our approach evolved, what we discovered along the way, and how Virtual Audiences now support us in faster and more flexible decision-making.

November = Black Friday. My inbox explodes, Instagram turns into a digital outlet, and suddenly I wonder if I really need yet another airfryer. Recognisable? You’re not alone. Black Friday isn’t just a shopping frenzy — it’s a lesson in psychology, dopamine, FOMO and our own buying behaviour.