EMOTION IN LEARNING: HOW LUXURY BRANDS USE STORYTELLING TO TRAIN RETAIL TEAMS
In luxury, training is no longer just about what teams know. It’s about how they make people feel.
When a client steps into a boutique, advisors are not only presenting products; they are curating a moment. As Sophie Robinson, Global Training Manager at L’Artisan Parfumeur, reminds us:
“Selling in the world of luxury also means being lively and captivating, while at the same time adapting to the person in front of you.”
Emily BDC, Digital Project Manager in Global Retail Education at CHANEL, says almost the same thing, but from a digital perspective:
“For storytelling it’s so important to, from the start, tell the story of the brand, create the immersion, make the learners feel engaged.”
Different houses, same conclusion: if training isn’t emotional, it doesn’t stick. At Emraude, we see emotion in learning as a strategic layer. It transforms training content into a lived experience, for both learners and clients.
Why Emotion is Strategic in Luxury Learning
Luxury is built on sensory memory, dream, and projection. Fragrance in particular is pure emotion: it triggers childhood memories, landscapes, textures, people.
For L’Artisan Parfumeur, this emotional dimension is part of the brand’s DNA. Sophie describes it simply:
“Emotion is really something central, especially with the senses and scents… There is a great deal of poetry at L’Artisan Parfumeur.”
But the same pattern appears with Rabanne and Sephora.
At Rabanne, Montserrat Garcia explains that onboarding is not only about explaining who Rabanne is, but about making people feel something for the brand:
“The main strategy is evoking a feeling and this human connection with the brand… so if I work in Sephora, I know everything about Rabanne and I can fall in love with Rabanne.”
At Sephora, Bekkay explains about turning a very operational topic, health and safety, into something playful and memorable:
“We tried to make it more funny, more intuitive, to create an experience and to have a different approach.”
In other words: whether the topic is poetic home fragrance, iconic couture beauty, bold disruptive fashion, or safety rules, the challenge is the same. If the experience doesn’t move people, it doesn’t last.
Yet in many organizations, learning is still treated as a list of facts:
- Notes and ingredients
- Launch calendars
- Technical milestones
Emotion‑led learning takes a different angle. It asks:
- How do we help advisors feel the brand universe, not just recite it?
- How do we equip them to translate that feeling into client stories?
That is exactly where gamified product training can make a difference, turning knowledge into a narrative.
From Product Training to Emotional Storytelling
From different maisons, the same shift appears: from “training as information” to “training as a lived moment”.
At L’Artisan Parfumeur, the La Maison collection is introduced through an illustrated Parisian apartment. Advisors explore rooms, discover objects, and encounter the iconic amber ball inside a real living space, not on a bullet-point slide.
At CHANEL, digital games are designed to feel like a small gift from the brand: beautiful interfaces, strong visual identity, subtle motion. Advisors recognize CHANEL within seconds, before any words appear.
At Rabanne, onboarding becomes a time-travel journey, jumping through key eras in the brand’s history. It is intentionally split into short chapters so advisors can complete it between clients without losing the storyline.
At Sephora, health & safety becomes a kind ofOlympic challenge: medals, podium, scores between stores. A topic that usually triggers eye rolls suddenly becomes a source of pride and competition.
In all four cases, the heart of the design is not “how do we present this content?” but “what experience do we want teams to live?”.
What Emotional Learning Looks Like in Practice
1. A strong central metaphor
A Parisian apartment, a time machine, an Olympic competition, a game inspired by a CHANEL runway mood… Each experience chooses one strong metaphor and sticks to it. That metaphor becomes the emotional anchor that learners remember.
2. Aesthetic as pedagogy
Design isn’t just decoration. For CHANEL, the look and feel of each module is part of the learning impact: if it looks and sounds like the brand, people lean in. For L’Artisan Parfumeur, detailed illustrations and textures help learners “smell with their eyes”.
3. Playful constraints
Rabanne’s chapters are intentionally short to respect retail time constraints. Sephora builds in competition to keep energy high. The idea isn’t to overload, but to work with reality, short attention spans, busy schedules, small screen formats.
4. Emotion before explanation
Most of these experiences start with a feeling: a space, a story, a challenge. Facts arrive after, in context. This is where your customer experience programs connect directly with learning: the way we train is already a preview of the way we expect people to host and sell.
Emotion‑driven learning helps teams:
- Move from technical description to client‑ready stories
- Align product storytelling with the house’s pioneering heritage
- Adapt the narrative to the person in front of them
This approach connects naturally with Emraude’s focus on brand & product foundations and sensory & emotional connection in its product training solutions.
Connecting Product Launches to Brand Heritage
La Maison experience does more than explain a category. It reconnects each product to the brand’s story:
- The amber ball becomes a symbol of craftsmanship and continuity.
- The relaunch becomes an opportunity to revisit the idea of “perfumer‑decorator”.
Sophie describes one key objective of the module:
“You don’t want the learner to remember only the product… You want it to be an opportunity for them to (re)learn, piece by piece, the house’s DNA.”
This is the same principle guiding Emraude’s onboarding experiences: each new touchpoint is a chance to reinforce culture, values, and heritage, not just deliver information.
Design Principles for Emotion‑Led Learning
From this project and others, several design principles emerge:
1. Anchor content in a concrete place.
2. Give learners a protagonist role.
3. Blend visual detail with concise text.
4. Link every launch back to DNA.
5. Design for global scale from day one.
Q&A: Emotion in Learning for Luxury & Fragrance
Why is emotion so important in luxury learning?
Because luxury clients are not buying only a product; they’re buying how it makes them feel. If training stays purely technical, advisors struggle to create those emotional connections in‑store. Emotion‑led learning gives teams words, images, and stories they can activate in any client interaction.
How can emotion be measured in a training context?
Emotion itself is difficult to quantify, but its effects are observable. For example:
- Completion rates and replays for experiential modules
- Storytelling quality during role‑plays or mystery shopping
- Changes in how often advisors recommend hero products like Abis or the amber ball
- Client feedback on experience and connection with the brand
Where should we introduce emotion first: onboarding or ongoing training?
Ideally, both. Onboarding is a powerful moment to create emotional alignment with the brand from day one. Later, product‑focused and client‑experience modules can build more advanced emotional storytelling skills. A consistent emotional thread across the learning journey increases impact.
What’s a low‑risk way to start?
A focused pilot works well:
- Choose one emblematic category or hero product.
- Design a short, immersive module around it.
- Track completion, feedback, and impact on in‑store storytelling.
From there, the model can be expanded to more launches, more regions, and eventually a full emotional learning ecosystem.
How does Emraude fit into this shift?
Emraude effectively acts as an experience architect: translating brand codes, business goals and time constraints into gamified journeys where emotion is part of the design brief, not an afterthought.