People are increasingly purchasing (e.g., food, clothes) and consuming (e.g., movies, courses) online where, traditionally, the sensory interaction has mostly been limited to visual, and to a lesser extent auditory, inputs. However, other sensory interfaces (e.g., including touch screens, together with a range of virtual, and augmented solutions) are increasingly being made available to people to interact online. Moreover, recent progress in the field of humancomputer interaction means that online environments will likely engage more of the senses and become more connected with offline environments in the coming years. This expansion will likely coincide with an increasing engagement with the consumer's more emotional senses, namely touch/haptics, and possibly even olfaction. Forward-thinking marketers and researchers will therefore need to appropriate the latest tools/technologies in order to deliver richer online experiences for tomorrow's consumers. This review is designed to help the interested reader better understand what sensory marketing in a digital context can offer, thus hopefully opening the way for further research and development in the area.

One of the brain's key roles is to facilitate foraging and feeding. It is presumably no coincidence, then, that the mouth is situated close to the brain in most animal species. However, the environments in which our brains evolved were far less plentiful in terms of the availability of food resources (i.e., nutriments) than is the case for those of us living in the Western world today. The growing obesity crisis is but one of the signs that humankind is not doing such a great job in terms of optimizing the contemporary food landscape. While the blame here is often put at the doors of the global food companies - offering addictive foods, designed to hit 'the bliss point' in terms of the pleasurable ingredients (sugar, salt, fat, etc.), and the ease of access to calorie-rich foods - we wonder whether there aren't other implicit cues in our environments that might be triggering hunger more often than is perhaps good for us. Here, we take a closer look at the potential role of vision; Specifically, we question the impact that our increasing exposure to images of desirable foods (what is often labelled 'food porn', or 'gastroporn') via digital interfaces might be having, and ask whether it might not inadvertently be exacerbating our desire for food (what we call 'visual hunger'). We review the growing body of cognitive neuroscience research demonstrating the profound effect that viewing such images can have on neural activity, physiological and psychological responses, and visual attention, especially in the 'hungry' brain.

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International audienceConsumers try to avoid temptation when exposed to appetizing foods by diverting their attention away from their senses (e.g., sight, smell, mouthfeel) and bodily states (e.g., state of arousal, salivation) in order to focus on their longer term goals (e.g., eating healthily, achieving an ideal body weight). However, when not including sensations in their decision-making processes, consumers risk depleting their self-regulatory resources, potentially leading to unhealthy food choices. Conversely, based on the concept of ``embodied self-regulation,'' the suggestion is made that considering bodily states may help consumers regulate their food choices more effectively. A new model is proposed that facilitates understanding observed consumer behavior and the success or failure of self-control in food intake. It is argued that bodily states and sensory information should be considered when modeling consumer behavior and developing health-related advocacy and communication campaigns. The model proposed here leads to new perspectives on consumer consumption behavior and health policy research and strategies. (C) 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc