Sometimes, when we spend our days looking at screens and trying to write, it’s easy to forget the arsenal of power we have built in. We experience the world in far more than just words, screens, logos, headlines, posts, and calls to action. Smell, sound, texture, temperature, taste, physical space, movement. All of these things constantly gather information and attach themselves to experiences, whether we’re conscious of it or not. And that’s automagic.
I stepped outside just now to take my trash to the dumpster, and the air smelled exactly like the air in upstate New York, in Oswego, during a faire. In the mornings, when we gathered for physical warm-ups, the air smelled sweet, mixed with the smells of the food vendors getting their days ready. Coffee, turkey legs, and deep-fried spuds all mixed in with the smell of the morning dew and the breeze off of Lake Ontario. I loved the smell.
On my short walk from my door to the dumpsters and back, I was filled with memories, and my body and mind went into pre-performance mode. I ran a checklist of my daily shows, bits I wanted to try and performers I wanted to connect with during the day to see if we could get something started, a good street bit, gather a crowd, hawk a show, and make sure to stay open for whatever the audience throws out and breathe, keep breathing.
It was amazing to me. By the time I was back in my place, sitting at my desk, I had gotten myself ready for a 12-hour performance day. And yet, I am just going to sit and write most of the day. But here I am ready to go. I miss those days. I miss doing street work. And I was amazed at how quickly the morning air pulled me back through time and landed me in Sterling, New York, among some genius artists, doing some of the hardest work I have ever done in my life. I was right there.
Now, I might be overselling the surprise because, as an actor, I know our sense of smell is like a time machine; it is a direct connection to memory. So I understand what I’m feeling; I was just surprised by how quickly and clearly it came upon me. How my mind immediately went into prep mode, even though I haven’t walked the faire grounds or played a mud beggar in over two decades; there I was. I’m kinda still there, and it’s a happy place.
What is exciting me this morning isn’t the memory, but how quickly I was pulled into it. I didn’t have to think about it; the sense drew me back, and everything else, my day prep, my self-advice to keep breathing, that all just happened automatically. Or, as Arthur, one of ThoughtLab’s devs, says, automagically. It is a combination of automatically and magic. I just learned the word, and it fits so perfectly into what I’m thinking about today.
Sense Magic
Sometimes, when we spend our days looking at screens and trying to write, it’s easy to forget the arsenal of power we have built in. We experience the world in far more than just words, screens, logos, headlines, posts, and calls to action. Smell, sound, texture, temperature, taste, physical space, movement. All of these things constantly gather information and attach themselves to experiences, whether we’re conscious of it or not. And that’s automagic. I didn’t decide to be pulled back into my past, to relive my experience on a faire day; it just happened. Stepping outside with the air smelling the way it does, my senses opened a door, and my brain walked through it. Fully. My brain, excited by my senses, went into automagic mode, and there I was.
Now, I’m not a doctor, but I play one at home, and I cannot go through the scientific neurologic reasons why I had this feeling; I can only say that the smell of the air caused me to have a very real, very vivid lived experience and that, to me, as a writer, a creative and an eater of strange foods, is very interesting.
I find it interesting because it makes me wonder how many times a day I ignore my other senses and let my eyes move me about and drive me. There is much more out there, and we have the capacity to understand more if we open up all our senses.
We Keep Marketing to the Eyes
We rely heavily on the eyes when we’re marketing, and I have no problem with that. In fact, if you dig into my past, you’ll see that my life goal is to be one giant eyeball. But maybe, just maybe, we can engage the other senses a bit, too. If you look at modern branding and marketing, it has become overwhelmingly visual. Websites. Social. Logos. Digital ads. Video. Email. We spend enormous amounts of time asking what something looks like. And, obviously, that matters. But humans didn’t suddenly become eyeballs attached to wallets when the internet arrived.
Brands exist in a sensory world whether they deliberately design that world or not. The sound when you open something. The feel of the packaging. The smell when you walk into a store. The music playing. The weight of something in your hand. Even the physical sensation of interacting with a product. All of those elements can and should be part of marketing, but we have gotten stuck in a visual realm.
If you’re selling cologne or perfume, you might highlight the scent notes. Hints of lavender, notes of espresso and coconut. But where are those sense-engaging ideas when you’re talking about something else? For example, when I lived in Utah, a landlocked state, I used to love to walk into this fish market in downtown Salt Lake. It was a small place with deep sinks and white cutting boards covered in fish guts. Sometimes I’d walk in and just smell the place because it brought me back to when I lived in Gloucester. The smell was fresh and clean; you could feel the ocean in that smell and the images it conjured: Sundays on the docks with my Grandfather putting our tackle together for a day of fishing. The docks and the fish market in Venice, Italy, tables and tables of the freshest fish I had ever seen, the smell of the ocean and the sound of the banter, the barter, the back and forth. The way Italians speak with such passion, even when they’re just buying dinner. All of those things came to me when I walked into that fish market.
We lean heavily on the sights and sounds when we’re selling, but the smells—those are important, and if you can use that to enhance your marketing, then you’re a step ahead of the pack. But this also makes me wonder: if we’re so conditioned to think visually, how much of a brand are we experiencing without realizing we’re experiencing the brand?
The Brands That Get Inside Us
Think about how many times you’ve heard a song, maybe on your drive into work, or your commute to school. You don’t even acknowledge the song, because you’re not fully engaged with your hearing. You’re driving, doing mental prep for the day, whatever; your attention is elsewhere. But, suddenly, you find yourself humming the song all through the day. You ask yourself, why am I doing this? When did I hear this song? Why is it stuck in my head? Without you even knowing it, one of your senses has taken control and planted a seed in your mind all on its own. Imagine being able to tap into that automatic kind of response: no effort, no hard work, just fully engaging one of the senses, and that’s stuck in someone’s head all day long.
That’s the beauty of the senses: they can be effortless and complete. Think about the smell of a coffee shop. Morning, you’ve still got bits of sleep in your pockets, you’re not firing on all pistons yet, and you walk by a coffee shop. The door opens and out comes all that coffee smell. A couple of things happen; one, you suddenly need that cup of coffee. Another thing happens: a memory is engaged; even if you’re not planning it, a memory will surface. Perhaps you entertain it for an instant; perhaps you allow that memory to be your thought as you sit and sip your coffee.
We sure do love that new car smell, right? How about the smell of the first cut grass in the summer? Tell me that when you’re driving, and you catch a whiff of that grass, your car windows are open for the first time that year and suddenly you’re on school vacation, you’ve got the summer ahead, no hands on your time, your kid, and you’re free. Cut grass. That smell. That memory.
It happens all the time, but most times, we move through it; we have too much to do, we’re too busy and all that. But that’s okay, and that’s the power of the senses. When you let them, they will pull you all over the emotions map. They will light the way to great memories and past times. They will fill your heart with hope and joy, and that’s just from smelling a crayon. Imagine the potential of harnessing the power of the smell of a Crayola Crayon.
That sensory experience can reach us before our rational brain gets involved. Before a massage lands, before a CTR is clicked, before a credit card number is input, our minds and emotions, for a brief moment, are not our own, and we are transported to better times, happier moments, great memories. All of that happens involuntarily. No work involved. Imagine your brand taking up space in people, taking it up deeply, and it happens reflexively. No major ad campaign with a huge budget and possible celebrities. A smell, a sound, the feeling of pulling the plastic screen off a new phone—those senses fully engaged do all the work.
When I stepped outside this morning, nobody had to convince me that the Sterling Faire mattered. Nobody presented me with a photograph of the faire and asked whether I remembered it. The air hit me and boom, I was a performer again.
You Can’t Manufacture Sterling
Here’s where this gets tricky because I can already hear some marketer somewhere saying, great, we need a smell. Find us a smell. We’ll pump it into the lobby, spray it on the packaging, maybe mist the customers with it as they walk through the door. Boom. Sensory branding. Except that’s not really what happened to me this morning.
The air outside my apartment didn’t transport me to Sterling because someone had engineered the perfect combination of morning dew, Lake Ontario, coffee, turkey legs, deep-fried potatoes, sweat, mud, and whatever else was floating around a Renaissance faire at six in the morning. It transported me because I had lived there. Not literally, although some summers it certainly felt that way, but I had spent enough mornings walking onto those grounds, warming up, getting ready, working with those performers, and preparing myself for twelve hours of street work that the smell became attached to all of it. The smell wasn’t the experience. It was simply where my brain had decided to store the key.
That distinction matters because you can’t manufacture meaning. You can create an environment. You can pay attention to the sounds, smells, textures, tastes, and physical experiences surrounding your brand. You can be deliberate about all of it. But none of those things mean much on their own. A company can pump a signature fragrance into its lobby, but if the experience sucks, congratulations, you’ve simply given disappointment a distinctive aroma.
The magic comes from what gets attached to those sensory cues over time. A smell becomes comforting because something comforting happened around it. A sound creates anticipation because we’ve heard it right before something we enjoy. A texture feels premium because experience has taught us to associate that feeling with quality. The sense memory isn’t creating the relationship. The relationship is giving the sense memory its power.
Nobody planned for the morning air at Sterling to stay with me for more than twenty years. Nobody needed to. The people, the work, the exhaustion, the laughter, the audiences, the mud, the shows, and thousands of little moments I couldn’t possibly remember individually did that work. Somewhere along the way, my brain bundled it all together and apparently labeled the file: open when the air smells like this.
That’s the opportunity for brands, but it’s also the warning. Don’t start with the trigger. Start with the experience. Give people something meaningful, useful, enjoyable, surprising, comforting, or simply damn good enough to become part of their lives. Pay attention to the sensory world around that experience, and stay consistent. Then give it time. You can’t manufacture Sterling. But you can create something worth remembering.
Build the Memory Before You Trigger It
If the sensory trigger only has power because of the experience attached to it, then maybe we’ve been thinking about sensory branding backward. The goal isn’t to find the perfect sound, smell, texture, or taste and hope people form some emotional connection to it. The goal is to create an experience good enough, and consistent enough, that those things begin to mean something.
That takes time, which isn’t always an easy thing to sell in a world where we measure everything immediately. We want the campaign to perform now. We want engagement now. We want people to remember us now. But memory doesn’t necessarily work on our schedule. Some of the things that stay with us longest become important through repetition. We encounter them again and again, usually without thinking much about them, until eventually they become part of the experience itself. The sound when something opens. The feel of something in your hand. The smell when you walk through a door. The little ritual that happens every time you use a product or interact with a company.
None of those things has to scream for attention. In fact, they may be more powerful when they don’t. The air at Sterling certainly wasn’t trying to brand itself. It was just the air. I probably walked through it hundreds of mornings without once thinking, I should really remember this smell because someday it’s going to knock me sideways on a trip to the dumpster. I was busy getting ready to work. But the smell was there every morning, attached to everything else that was happening, quietly becoming part of the experience.
That’s an interesting thing for brands to consider because so much of branding is built around being noticed. We want the logo to stand out, the headline to grab attention, the campaign to break through, the message to stick. Those things matter, but maybe some of the strongest brand connections are being built in places nobody is measuring. They’re happening in the small, repeated details of the experience, the things customers encounter so consistently that they eventually stop noticing them altogether.
Until one day they do.
And suddenly a sound, a smell, a texture, or some other tiny sensory cue opens a door they didn’t even know was there. The brand isn’t asking to be remembered at that point. It already is. The trigger simply gives someone a way back to it.
You can’t force that kind of connection, and you certainly can’t put it on a quarterly schedule. What you can do is pay attention to the experience you’re creating today. Make it consistent. Make it distinctive. Make it worth coming back to. Give people enough good experiences and enough time, and some of those little details may begin carrying far more weight than you ever intended.
Build the memory first. The trigger will take care of itself.
The Takeaway
At ThoughtLab, we spend a lot of time thinking about how brands connect with people. We think about what they say, how they look, how they behave, and what kind of experience they create. But this morning reminded me that there’s another part of that equation that’s incredibly easy to overlook. People don’t experience brands as an audience sitting politely in front of a screen waiting for the next message. We experience the world with everything we’ve got. We see it, hear it, smell it, touch it, taste it, and, without consciously deciding to, we file pieces of those experiences away.
That’s why sensory branding shouldn’t begin with a discussion about what your store should smell like or what sound should play when your app opens. Those things can matter, but only because of what eventually gets attached to them. The real work is creating an experience worth remembering in the first place. Treat people well. Give them something useful. Surprise them. Delight them. Be consistent enough that the little details surrounding those experiences have a chance to settle in and become familiar. You may never know which detail someone’s brain decides to keep.
And maybe that’s part of what makes this so interesting. Brands work incredibly hard to be remembered, but the strongest memories aren’t always the ones we deliberately create. Sometimes they’re built quietly, through repetition and experience, until something seemingly insignificant becomes a key to a door we forgot was there.
I don’t know exactly what was in the air outside my apartment this morning. I only know that for a few minutes, I wasn’t taking out the trash anymore. I was back in Sterling, getting ready for twelve hours of performing, reminding myself to stay open, see what the audience gives me, and, most importantly, breathe.
More than twenty years later, the air remembered.
That’s a hell of a brand connection.
