Charles Melcher's collaborative process for designing multisensory activations that turn attendees into advocates

For centuries, humans consumed stories around fires, in theaters, through communal experiences that engaged their entire bodies. Then radio, film, and television trained us to be passive spectators consuming through exactly two senses. 

Charles Melcher, founder of Future of Storytelling and author of The Future of Storytelling: How Immersive Experiences Are Transforming Our World, has spent 30+ years developing collaborative processes that turn experiential marketing from expensive spectacle into memory-forming experiences. 

Melcher had his start in book publishing, where he produced 30+ New York Times bestsellers for clients like Al Gore and Lin-Manuel Miranda, when Melcher realized during the 2008 financial crisis that his company wasn't in the book business.

The business was in the storytelling. 

That epiphany came when he convinced Al Gore to turn their book Our Choice into a multimedia interactive app. Not long after, it won Apple's Award for Best Design App of the Year, proving that digital tools could create more powerful story experiences than traditional media.

Key Takeaways

• Brands designing for all human senses create stronger neural pathways and longer-lasting memories than traditional sight-and-sound experiences
• Collaborative development where clients physically experience reference examples builds shared language before expensive production begins
• Positioning brands as mentors rather than heroes can enable customer transformation that leads to organic social amplification

You're missing 28 senses that create brand love

Most experiential marketing suffers from the same limitation plaguing all brand storytelling: designing for exactly two human senses. Even sophisticated marketers exploring immersive activations often replicate passive consumption models in three-dimensional spaces. They create beautiful visual installations with compelling soundtracks, then wonder why attendance doesn't translate to lasting brand affinity.

Human beings possess 20-30 distinct senses, including:

• Interoception (feeling you own bodies internal signals like hunger or heart rate)
• Proprioception (knowing where you are in space)
• Equilibrium (sense of balance)
• Chronoception (perception of time)

Brands routinely ignore sensory channels that could create deeper emotional engagement and stronger memory formation. 

The scientific foundation supports this: research shows experiences engaging the full body create more emotional power and superior memory retention. A 2006 theater study found actors who learned lines while physically blocking scenes recalled them months later, while actors memorizing from a written script forgot most lines within five months.

Experiential budgets struggle to justify limited reach compared to standard media buys, while organizations measure success by attendance numbers rather than the depth and retention of the experience.

"Most people have grown up in a world where they consume their stories and their messages through their eyes and their ears, and that's it," Melcher explains. 

"It's as if every painting in the world had only been painted with two colors, and people forget that there are something along the magnitude of 20 to 30 senses."

How to build experiences that stick

Step 1: Share Experiences to Build Common Language

Melcher starts every project by taking clients and agency teams to experience 5-15 different immersive storytelling examples. Teams visit established productions like Sleep No More and ABBA Voyage alongside emerging installations and technologies. When teams develop sensory vocabulary through shared experience, they can articulate specific design parameters rather than defaulting to vague "we want it immersive" requests.

Step 2: Research Brand Story and Customer Goals

With shared sensory vocabulary established, Melcher's team conducts deep research examining both brand authenticity and genuine customer goals.
"We need to get companies to stop thinking of themselves as the hero of the story, which is what they all do, and rather think of their customer as the hero," he explains, referring to the positional shift audiences experience. "The hero is the customer, and the company's role is helping that hero on their journey."

Step 3: Co-Create Through Collaborative Workshops

Melcher doesn’t do traditional agency pitches. He facilitates structured workshops where brand teams, agency creatives, and experiential designers generate concepts together.

"Good creative is when a client feels like, 'Oh, my god, we thought of that!' Right?” he notes. “That's good creative, because now they're so invested in it, they love it. They're co-creators.” 

Step 4: Execute with Specialized Partners

Future of Storytelling serves as creative leadership and executive production, assembling specialized teams based on each experience's demands. Melcher's role becomes orchestrating the right players in the right moments, ensuring the shared language developed in earlier steps translates into flawless technical execution.

The ripple effect of full-body experiences

When brands follow this collaborative process, they create experiences where participants engage their full bodies, access emotions beyond sight and sound, and exercise meaningful agency. Memory formation lasts months or years rather than minutes or days.

Melcher reframes the reach concern: "Somebody walks in, we're counting it as one set of eyeballs, and yet they've walked out with their mind blown. They’re telling everyone, sharing it like crazy on social media, and talking about it for years.”

“If those people spend 1 to 2 hours immersed in a story with your brand, that's worth thousands—or hundreds of thousands—of impressions."

That math changes how brands design experiences. For Meta, it meant using realistic simulations of outer space to create the "overview effect" normally reserved for astronauts. For Apple, it meant extending beyond launch weekend with month-long storytelling programming that built community threads rather than one-time buzz.

Meta’s Connect Conference: When training becomes a fond memory

Meta needed a grand finale for their Connect conference, where Mark Zuckerberg announced the company's name change from Facebook to Meta. Future of Storytelling, in collaboration with Felix & Paul Studio, created a VR experience.

"By putting on the headset, participants were able to have the perception of leaving the space station, floating in zero gravity and looking down on the earth," Melcher explains. 

“Fewer than 600 people have ever been to space, and many of them spoke of the “overview effect” they felt, which is the profound cognitive shift that comes from that perspective.” 

The Apple Store opening: Going beyond launch weekend

Apple engaged FoST to help turn the launch of their Apple Carnegie Library store in DC into an immersive experience–one designed to extend far beyond opening weekend. Through month-long storytelling programming they created community threads rather than single-event activations. 

"We amplified the opening weekend festivities by curating a selection of live performances by local storytellers working across forms (spoken word poetry, acappella, readings, etc.). These added memorable surprises and delights while reinforcing the building's heritage as a public library. The storytelling theme was extended through a curriculum that FoST helped to develop as part of the Today at Apple public educational programming that ran for the first month. Rather than treating the opening as a one-time moment, the experience became an ongoing relationship builder that kept customers engaged long after the initial excitement faded.

While Melcher creates these experiences directly with clients, he's quick to recognize when other brands crack the code on multisensory engagement. Netflix's Queen's Ball represents exactly the kind of thinking he champions: designing experiences that give participants physical memories to carry forward, not just visual moments to post about.

Netflix’s Bridgerton: Queen's Ball: The power of physical gesture

When Netflix created an immersive experience for Bridgerton fans, they designed for gesture and movement, not just visuals. 

"One of my favorite examples of embodied storytelling was from Netflix's Bridgerton: The Queen's Ball,” Melcher explains. “In the experience, guests have the opportunity to be presented to the Queen. Upon meeting Her Highness, each person performed their own elaborate curtsey. In doing so they brought their own creativity to this act of bowing to the Queen. It was such a simple and inexpensive idea, but the guests loved it. It was a form of wish fulfillment, personal expression and embodied emotion all wrapped in a single gesture.”

It’s a testament to how immersive full-body activations can be something so simple, yet so memorable and emotional for the audiences participating. The physical act of curtseying—humbling yourself before royalty while executing a theatrical movement—created emotional engagement that watching the show never could.