Sensory Marketing at Work: How Salespersons Facilitate Customers' Haptic Product Experience through Interactive Service Work

Despite evidence linking customer product touch to positive sales outcomes, how salespeople actively facilitate intersubjective tactile experience remains underexplored. Adopting a practice‐based perspective, this study analyzes sales interactions in bedding retail stores using ethnomethodological conversation analysis. The findings show that salespeople actively guide customers' sensory perception as a situated sensory marketing. In particular, the study identifies an embodied practice termed model touch , through which salespeople demonstrate and instruct specific ways of touching products. These findings contribute to debates on embodiment and situated experience in service encounters and highlight the value of fine‐grained qualitative methods for analyzing interactive service work.