When I was a kid, a movie crew came to my little hometown and set up a diner. A true-to-form 1950s-style diner. The diner was a 1920s Worcester Lunch Car (No. 594) that had previously operated in Cambridge. The film was The Brink’s Job, directed by William Friedkin and starring Peter Falk. This was back in 1978. They shot one scene there, and that was it. But the set stayed up for three weeks in case they had to reshoot. After filming wrapped, I rode my bike along Birch Meadow Drive, pulled into the vacant lot where the diner was set up, and looked around.

Two things happened that day as I spent more than three hours carefully slipping into the diner and looking about. One, I fell in love with the idea of making movies. See, there was so much detail: coffee cups and plates with toast and egg remnants. Stools and newspapers from the 50s lay next to ashtrays filled with filterless cigarette butts. The posters on the walls, the coffee maker, the grill in the back. It was all there. And I discovered that I could step from my life, a kid on his bike, into another dimension, another time, and get completely engrossed in it. I feel the same way to this day when I step on a set. I didn’t know the full extent of it that day, but I knew I wanted to be part of this business that could set up history in the present day and create a world that you could step in and out of. That was the first discovery.

The second discovery, like my drive to make movies, has stayed with me ever since. The second thing I discovered was that I love diners. Love them; however, I love a very specific type of diner. I love the diners that remind me of that film set. The weathered feeling, the age on the walls and counters. The close feeling, the image of the stools along the counter full of guys smoking and drinking coffee. The red leather booth benches, the menus with no lamination. There was history here, but it didn’t announce itself; it didn’t say, “Oh, look at this historical hall — it’s like a museum.”

It was very much like a museum in that diner car. I walked through it gingerly, not wanting to disrupt anything. I knew nothing about making movies at that time, but something in me knew that if I disturbed even a napkin, I would be making someone’s job much harder. I liked the feeling, and for me it was different than being in a museum. Museums say stay your distance, don’t touch, don’t look too close. This diner, this movie set, said: look, touch (though I didn’t fall for that particular siren’s call), be present, be involved. Although it felt like a museum, it felt more like a museum in motion, a museum of potential: just wait and see what we do here — that was the feeling that held me.

From that day, that three-hour exploration of a movie set that appeared in my small hometown, my life quest started. One: to make a movie. Not to be a movie star, just to be part of creating a movie. Be a part of taking people on trips into history and life. Two: to find diners like this one and frequent them.

Diners 

Anyone can open a restaurant and slap the word diner on the side and go about their merry pancake-making ways. That’s fine, I’ve eaten in plenty of those, but they aren’t the diners I’m seeking out. Those are not the diners that make up my quest. I’ll try any diner to see if it incites the feeling I got creeping about that movie set back in 1978. Rarely do the places that call themselves diners but are set up like a regular restaurant cause me that kind of memory burst.

You see, the word “diner” itself actually comes from “dining car” on a train. Historically, these roadside structures were also called “lunch cars” or “night lunch wagons” because factories built them like railcars and shipped them on flatbeds. When an actual retired railroad car is repurposed into a restaurant, it is specifically called a railcar diner or Pullman diner, and those are the ones I love. They are the holy grail, and I have found them on roads you wouldn’t believe anyone traveled, in woods that suddenly open to a parking lot, and there is the diner. And when you go into one of these backwoods places, it’s always full or near full.

There are a couple of magical things that happen in a good diner. When you walk in, inevitably a waitress in a uniform, complete with a hat, will say, “Just sit anywhere, hon.” That word “hon” is what signals to me that I have hit on one of those places. At one place in Kentucky, where I went when I was with Kentucky Shakespeare, a waitress said to me, “Just plant that cute little butt anywhere, dear, I’ll bring you coffee.” I had a cute little butt! I haven’t heard that again in my life. Magic.

A couple of things let me know I’m in my kind of diner. The coffee is always good, and it’s strong. There are no little containers of half and half; there’s cream in a small pitcher, either steel or ceramic. There’s always a daily special that’s written on a board when you walk in, and if you’re polite and the waitress likes you, she’ll give you a tip. “Just between you and me, Earl (the short-order cook) has a batch of fresh boysenberry pancake batter we’re saving just for our special guests,” she might say — or she’ll mention some secret menu item they only tell their favorite customers about. Frequent these places long enough, and you’ll get to understand that everyone gets the tip, but it’s not written anywhere, so you feel like you got the real inside scoop.

One of the biggest tells that a diner is the kind I like is its physical state. If it’s polished clean and shiny, if it gets a paint job every month, if there are air dryers in the bathroom, or if there’s a sign that says, “Forgive our dust, we’re remodeling to make your experience better,” those are warning signs. You see, a good diner, with good food, nothing fancy, will always be a little bit dirty. A little sticky on the counters and tables. A few cracks in the wall plaster. A few of the chairs have been repaired with duct tape. The building shows signs of life and history; it’ll do you right. If it’s too clean, too new, too renovated, the life has gone out of it, but it will be fine; the food will be good, but the experience won’t be the one I’m looking for. A little dirt, a little grease, and that’s the place to beat. That’s my kind of diner.

Authenticity 

“A real, authentic American experience” is what the sign for Joe’s American Bar & Grille in Venice says. Italians seemed to love the place. I went on a Tuesday evening, and the place was packed. A hostess approached me, said, “Howdy,” in a terrible American accent, and thus began my “authentic” American experience.

It’s fun to see what other countries define as an authentic American experience. Before I go any further, I have to confess that this experience happened years ago when being American in Europe was not a cause for hatred or pity. Americans were okay! So, it was great to see that an American experience featured happy faces, positive vibes, lots of sports references, and food that viewed the boundaries of a plate as mere suggestions. Those were the good old days, and I miss them dearly.

The experience was wonderful. My friends and I were Americans in what felt like an American museum. People took pictures with us, gave us lots of thumbs-up gestures, and the waiter kept telling us, “Just like in America, right?” But it wasn’t. Don’t get me wrong: the people were great, the atmosphere was fun and full of energy, and the food: buonissimo! Maybe it wasn’t authentically American, but the Italians sure know their way around a kitchen, so the food was incredible.

It was billed as a diner, but it wasn’t. It was too big, with too much open space; it had a bar, which traditional diners don’t have. But, above all, it was spotless, super clean and neat. No cracks in the plaster, no torn wallpaper, and no missing floor tiles. They did their best with American accents; I felt bad telling them that people from Boston, my hometown, don’t say howdy. Despite the accents and the assurance that everything was “just like in America, right?” it wasn’t. No one called me “hon”; there were no secret specials, and I had to ask for a refill, unlike the magical appearance of coffee in your cup at a good diner. It was fun and delicious, but it wasn’t an American diner. It was too polished, too put together; maybe it was too authentic, if that can be a thing.

I hadn’t joined ThoughtLab yet, hadn’t started my copywriter life yet, so I had no idea how overused and poorly defined “authentic” was.

Dirt in the Corners 

I clearly recall my three hours of exploring the movie set diner in my little hometown. I loved the detail, like the dirt in the corners on the floor around the door jamb and the bottom of the counter. It made the set feel like it was part of the earth, part of the land of my town. I knew that much dirt couldn’t have formed on its own; the set had been there for a matter of days, but the dirt spoke of years.

The dust, the chipped paint, the cracked plaster, the chipped dishes and cups in the sink and on the tables — no one had to say, “This is an authentic diner experience”; you could see it all around you.

I have since joined ThoughtLab and learned that “authentic” is a gimmick; it’s marketing speak, and if you ask anyone in the business for a definition, you’ll never get the same one twice. “Authentic” has become one of those words we use when we want people to believe something about us without doing the considerably harder work of giving them a reason to believe it. Brands tell us they’re authentic. Restaurants promise authentic experiences. Companies talk about their authentic voice, authentic values, authentic relationships, authentic storytelling. Everybody is authentic now, which is probably the surest sign that nobody knows what the hell authentic means anymore.

The funny thing is, that diner I walked through in 1978 wasn’t authentic at all. It was a movie set. The dirty coffee cups weren’t left behind by customers rushing off to work. The cigarette butts hadn’t been smoked by guys sitting at the counter arguing about the Red Sox. The dirt around the door jamb hadn’t accumulated over twenty years of boots coming through the door. Somebody put it there. Somebody chipped the paint. Somebody decided exactly how dirty the floor should be. Somebody arranged those newspapers, dirtied those plates, filled those ashtrays and created the illusion of years in a place that had existed for a matter of days.

And I believed every bit of it.

That’s the part of authenticity we don’t talk about enough. Authenticity isn’t necessarily about whether something is literally real. Sometimes it’s about whether something is specific enough, consistent enough, and carefully considered enough that we accept it as real. The people who built that diner understood the world they were creating so completely that they knew the dirt mattered. Not because anyone watching The Brink’s Job was going to stop the movie, point at the bottom of the counter and say, “Now that is some historically accurate grime.” The dirt mattered because without it, something would have felt wrong.

That’s what Joe’s American Bar & Grille in Venice was missing. They had all the obvious stuff. They had the American food, the sports references, the accents, the portions, and enough Americana scattered around the place to make Uncle Sam feel underdressed. They had worked very hard to create an authentic American experience. But they had concentrated on the things people associate with America rather than the little things that make an American place feel American. They had the costume. They were missing the dirt in the corners.

Brands do this all the time. We identify the characteristics we think people expect from us, polish them up, put them on the website, and then wonder why the result feels manufactured. We add the right words. We adopt the right tone. We take pictures of employees laughing around conference tables. We tell people we’re passionate, transparent, human and, of course, authentic. Then we sand away every oddity, contradiction and imperfection that might actually prove there are human beings somewhere behind all that branding. Maybe authenticity lives in exactly those things.

Maybe it’s the slightly strange sentence nobody else in your industry would write. Maybe it’s admitting that you don’t have an answer instead of manufacturing one because the marketing calendar says something has to go out Tuesday. Maybe it’s keeping something customers love even though the consultants tell you it looks dated. Maybe it’s having enough confidence in who you are that you don’t have to constantly explain who you are.

Because the dirt in the corners isn’t really dirt. It’s evidence. Evidence that something has been used, lived in, bumped into, repaired, loved, and allowed to become itself over time. You can manufacture the appearance of that, as a very talented movie crew proved to a kid wandering around a diner set in 1978. What you can’t manufacture nearly as easily is the feeling that comes from all those details belonging together. And when they do, nobody needs the sign telling them it’s authentic.

Stop Saying Authentic 

Maybe we should stop saying “authentic.” Not forever, perhaps, but at least until we figure out what we mean by it. Because the moment a brand has to tell me it’s authentic, I start wondering why it felt necessary to mention it in the first place. It’s a little like someone introducing themselves by saying, “I’m very trustworthy.” Maybe you are, but now I’m keeping an eye on my wallet.

The problem isn’t that brands shouldn’t try to be authentic. Quite the opposite. The problem is that authenticity works much better as evidence than as a claim. You don’t tell people you’re honest; you behave honestly. You don’t tell people you care about your customers; you answer the phone when something goes wrong. You don’t tell people you have a sense of humor; you make them laugh. And you certainly don’t become human by putting the word “human” somewhere in your brand guidelines. You make choices, repeatedly and consistently, that reveal something recognizable and specific about who you are.

That’s where the dirt in the corners comes back. A brand’s dirt isn’t incompetence, bad service, or some charming excuse for doing lousy work. Nobody wants a diner where the cook has to scrape yesterday’s eggs off the grill before making today’s. The dirt I’m talking about is the stuff that accumulates when you allow a business to have a personality. The quirks, habits, language, traditions and little imperfections that belong specifically to you. Things that might make a branding committee nervous because they aren’t polished enough, universal enough, or easily explained in a PowerPoint presentation.

Branding puts tremendous pressure on us to clean all of that up. We benchmark competitors, study best practices, test language, and smooth out anything that might confuse somebody. All of that can be useful, and sometimes absolutely necessary, but if you aren’t careful, you can keep polishing until there’s nothing left to recognize. The website looks beautiful. The copy is professional. The photography is gorgeous. Everything is exactly where it should be, and somehow the whole thing feels like Joe’s American Bar & Grille in Venice. Howdy, welcome to our “authentic” brand experience.

The brands that feel authentic rarely seem to be working very hard at convincing you. They know what they are, and that understanding shows up everywhere. It’s in the language they use when nobody is launching a campaign. It’s in how an employee handles a problem. It’s in the thing they refuse to change because their customers would miss it. It’s in the joke they’re willing to make, the opinion they’re willing to have, and occasionally even the thing they’re willing to admit they don’t do particularly well. None of those things alone creates authenticity. Together, though, they create something much more valuable: recognition.

That’s something we think about a lot at ThoughtLab. When we’re helping build or reshape a brand, the goal shouldn’t be to manufacture authenticity. It should be to uncover what’s already there and decide what deserves to remain visible. What are the things this company does that another company wouldn’t? How does it speak when nobody is trying to make it sound like a brand? What do its customers know about it that hasn’t made its way into the official messaging? Where are the scratches, the repaired chairs, the secret boysenberry pancakes and, yes, the dirt in the corners?

Because maybe the most authentic thing a brand can do is stop trying to look authentic and become specific instead. Specific has fingerprints. Specific has history. Specific occasionally has a crack in the plaster. And unlike authenticity, you don’t have to announce it. People can see it for themselves.

The Takeaway 

I was a kid when I walked into that diner set in 1978. I didn’t know anything about filmmaking, set design, branding, marketing, or authenticity. I didn’t know someone had spent hours deciding where to put the coffee cups, how much food to leave on the plates, or how dirty the floor around the door jamb needed to be. I certainly didn’t understand that an entire crew of people had worked very hard to make something fake feel completely real. I just knew I believed it.

Nearly fifty years later, I can still see that diner. I remember the stools, the newspapers, the cigarette butts, the chipped dishes and, strangely enough, the dirt in the corners. Somewhere along the way, I also learned that the things that stayed with me weren’t the things announcing what the diner was supposed to be. They were the little things nobody expected me to notice. Together, they created a world convincing enough that a kid on a bicycle stepped inside and, for three hours, forgot about everything outside.

Brands spend enormous amounts of time trying to create that same kind of belief. We search for the right words, images, positioning, and ways to tell people who we are. All of that matters. At ThoughtLab, it’s a big part of what we do. But perhaps the best branding doesn’t begin by asking how we can convince people that a company is authentic. Maybe it begins by looking closely at the company itself and asking what’s already there that nobody else could honestly claim.

Keep some of that. Protect it. Build around it. Don’t polish every surface simply because you can. Don’t replace every cracked tile because somebody decided everything needs to look new. Give people enough real, specific details to discover who you are without having to tell them what they’re supposed to see.

Because nobody ever walked into a great old diner, slid onto a duct-taped stool, wrapped their hands around a hot cup of coffee, and thought, “This place really needs a sign telling me it’s authentic.” They already knew.

Villains

In movies and TV shows, we love a good villain. Someone who creeps us out, makes us hope for their horrific end, and yet keeps us hoping they don’t die. We want to see the villain, root against him, and marvel at his villainousness. The more cruel and wicked the villain, the more we like him. Hans Gruber in Die Hard, smooth, cool, witty, and mean. Love that guy! How about Darth Vader? Now that’s a villain: classic, dressed in black, evil powers, knew the right path and yet deliberately took the dark path. That is some serious villain behavior. Luke and Obi-Wan would be nothing; their story would be so lame if they didn’t have a great villain to fight. And, thankfully, Lucas gave us the heavy-breathing, psychotic, force-bending villain of our dreams.

A good villain can move a story along nicely. A poorly constructed villain—nothing under the villainy, just villain for villain’s sake—doesn’t cut it. A good villain has depth, and if played right, they can elicit sympathy and even empathy from an audience if their backstory is good enough—if we see that, inside, the villain is really a decent guy, just misunderstood, or lacking good guidance to help them make non-villain choices. Hannibal Lecter, that’s a villain that defies logic. He kills people, and he eats them. How villainous is that? On top of that, he’s brilliant, a great cook, and a lover of all things fine and luxurious. You have a brilliant and driven agent, Starling, who is compelling and noble and fighting for what’s right. Of course, she needs a good, brilliant opposite, and Hopkins gives us that in his Lecter. We can’t take our eyes off him, and he’s the thing we remember most about the film. Here’s something fun: Hopkins won the Oscar for Best Actor for that performance, and yet, in a one-hour and fifty-eight-minute film, Hopkins’s Lecter has only 16 minutes of screen time. That’s how much he dominated the film’s psychological landscape. Now, that’s a villain.

There are so many villains through history, ones in novels, short stories, and then the great film villains. We love to hate them and hate that we love them because they should be evil and hated, but secretly, don’t we all wish we could be that evil and do some of the things villains do? No? Maybe that’s just my pile of revenge slips and me. Revenge slips are the pieces of paper jammed in my wallet with the names of people who have “wronged” me, and now my life is lived purely in pursuit of revenge.

Of course that’s not true, but wouldn’t that make a great villain origin story?

But villains don’t exist solely in the pages of novels or on screens big and small. There are villains all around us, and ThoughtLab, the heroes that we are, fight villains all the time.

Villains of Marketing

In marketing, we know it is vital to identify a villain a brand truly fights. Now these villains are tricky because they don’t wear all black, they don’t ride around in flashy cars, and they don’t make threats like, “You have ten minutes to stop the timer on this bomb, save the girl, and give me the briefcase full of money (or the secret codes or the plutonium), or the world will be destroyed.” The villains that marketing heroes like ThoughtLab fight are more subtle and less flashy. Their threats are destructive to the brand, but not destroy-the-entire-planet destructive. Certainly destroy-your-brand destructive. The villain in a marketing campaign is usually a core problem, obstacle, or antagonist your customer, the hero, must defeat. Instead of a literal person, the villain is usually a root-cause pain point—like wasted time, high costs, confusion, or a frustrating status quo—and your brand acts as the guide or tool that helps the customer win.

Types of Marketing Villains

• External problems: Tangible hurdles like a broken-down appliance, a messy inbox, or a physical illness.
• Internal frustrations: Emotional struggles such as self-doubt, fear of failure, or feeling overwhelmed.
• Systemic barriers: Flawed industry standards, red tape, or traditional ways of doing things that waste people’s money.

Now, you may ask, why does my marketing campaign need a villain? Because they work. A good campaign has a clear target, and a villain is that target. So, having a villain in your campaign does the following:

• Creates tension: A story feels flat without an opposing force pushing back against the buyer’s goals.
• Drives action: People are often more motivated to run from pain and frustration than to chase a generic reward.
• Builds community: Sharing a common enemy unites customers and builds fierce brand loyalty toward the company fighting by their side.

A great story has a hero’s journey and a villain to vanquish. When you have one that feels universal, then you have something for your hero, your brand, to triumph over. And nothing builds loyalty like a triumphant hero. Find that villain, give your brand the tools to vanquish that villain, and stay true to that hero you’ve created, and your brand will be fine.

The End.

But not really.

Recognizing the villain

The villain, in any story, has got to be real and has to represent real danger to the public. Without a real danger, a certified villain, you’re just creating problems so you can solve them, and eventually, people will see through that, and once they do, you’ll have a hard time getting people to come back to your brand because they won’t trust you. They’ll see you as creating panic and fear, just to sell a few more units. The villain must be real, or your hero, your customer, is not real either.

Finding and recognizing that villain, naming them, calling out their power, and offering real, tangible solutions isn’t easy, which is why not everyone can be a marketer at the level of ThoughtLab.

For help finding, naming, and vanquishing that villain, it’s not a bad idea to look at how an actor plays a villain.

Finding a villain

In acting, we have something we call the magic if. The master himself, Stanislavski, created it and passed it down to us. The magic if states it simply: what would I do IF I were this particular character in this particular situation? It creates a personal connection between the actor and the character, so the actor isn’t putting on the shell of a character but instead seeking it within themselves. Seeking within helps the actor stay grounded in the reality they create, and it helps them find a reliable, playable, accessible emotional life, because instead of pretending emotions, actors use their actual emotional experiences to fill in the character gaps.

This approach can feel a little intimidating. The reality is, you have to look inside yourself and find the part of you that could be a villain. You have to admit that in you is a Hannibal Lecter or someone equally awful. And you have to love that part of yourself in order to make the villain work.

One of the best ways to do this is to be willing to be the villain in your own story. Not a character, not words written on a page or a screen, but in your actual life. When have you been on the edge of being a villain, and when have you crossed that edge and become an actual villain? This, dear readers, takes courage.

My Villain

It’s easy to sit in an ivory tower and write about what you should do. Create blogs like: Best practices for lulling your customers into a false sense of security. Or Top ten things your branding agency needs to have in the office. Sitting back, gathering a tidbit of information and stretching it into 1800 words is a copywriter’s job. We do it in our sleep. Why use one word when seven is more words?

But I would be remiss and a big ol’ coward if I didn’t discuss my villains in this piece. Because I have them and they taught me something. So …

I have made no excuses for the fact that I’m an alcoholic. I am in recovery and have been sober for close to ten years now. I’m happy about that and proud to discuss it with anyone who is struggling with addiction. However, I could never have gotten sober if I hadn’t done one thing: and that is to be willing to be the villain in my own story. To admit that I was doing terrible things and allowing alcohol to take the blame. Of course, I was the one who took the drink, but I was also the one who blamed the drink for all my problems.

I used to dismiss the problem with things like: “I’ve never been drunk at an audition, a rehearsal or a performance.” Which is true apart from one time during a production of Much Ado, when I was directed to be sharing shots with Don John, and on closing night, the actor playing Don John, who brought the flask onstage that we were sharing, put actual whiskey in the flask, and by the end of the scene, we were both pretty hammered. But I prided myself on the fact that I kept drinking out of my work. Yay me, I’m not a drunk.

Not so true. When I started thinking it was time to get sober, I had to see myself as the villain in my story. I was telling only half the story; I don’t drink when work is an issue. I keep the art sacred and free of drinking. That’s the story I sold to everyone. But when the day was done, I drank from my own flask as soon as I stepped out of the theater. I was also closing bars like Johnny’s on Second, every single night. I was very fond of drinking at home as well and often mixed up being blacked out for a good night’s rest. None of that was hero behavior.

So to get sober and healthy, I had to admit that I had been hiding behind my brave brag of never allowing my art to be hindered by my drinking. But, of course, it did. All those nights being drunk wreaked havoc on my ability to learn lines. It also kept me from forming any true, deep connection to a character. My hero was this concocted person who never allowed liquor to touch his lips during a show, but lived by W.C. Fields’ life view: “I never drink water, fish fuck in it.” I was lying to myself, and I knew it.

When I started taking actual stock of my life and my drinking, I had to look at those things with clear-eyed honesty. I had done some terrible things when I was drunk. I said things and treated people badly. I was always devising a way to have a drink, yet I desperately held on to this image of the conscientious artist. But once I accepted the reality, I was the villain in my story, not the drink, not the pub, not the people I drank with, me. Side note: most of the time, I drank alone.

The reality I finally accepted was that my villain was and still is me.

What I see in me

Once I fully admitted and accepted that I was indeed a villain, it became the start of my journey to sobriety. It also helped me recognize the villain in myself and in others on the same journey more easily.

And here’s the strange thing about recognizing the villain: once you know who it really is, you can stop fighting all the wrong things. I spent years blaming alcohol, circumstances, bad nights, bad decisions, bad influences, stress, loneliness, celebration, boredom, whatever happened to be handy. I had a whole rogues’ gallery ready to take the blame. But none of those things could change anything because none of them was actually in charge. I was.

That’s not an especially comfortable realization, but it’s an incredibly useful one.

Because once I could see the villain clearly, I could finally understand what he wanted, how he operated, what lies he told, and, most importantly, how to fight him. I knew his tricks because they were my tricks. I knew his excuses because I’d written them. I knew how persuasive he could be because I’d spent years being persuaded by him. The villain wasn’t some mysterious force lurking outside of me. I knew the guy intimately.

And knowing your villain changes the fight.

That’s true in life, acting, storytelling, branding, and marketing. If you identify the wrong villain, you spend all your energy fighting something that isn’t actually causing the problem. Worse, you might invent a villain because it makes your story easier to tell. But if you’re willing to look closely enough, and sometimes uncomfortably enough, you can find the thing that’s really standing between where you are and where you want to be.

That’s when you have something worth fighting.

The Takeaway

We talk a lot in marketing about heroes. We want the customer to be the hero. We want the brand to help them on their journey. We want transformation, triumph, victory, and all the other lovely things that happen right before the music swells and the credits roll.

But heroes don’t mean much without something real to overcome.

Finding that something requires more than deciding what sounds good in a campaign meeting. It means understanding your customer well enough to know what’s genuinely frustrating them, frightening them, costing them time, costing them money, or keeping them from getting where they want to go. Sometimes the villain is a competitor. Sometimes it’s an outdated system. Sometimes it’s confusion, complexity, complacency, or the way an entire industry has always done things. And sometimes, uncomfortable as it may be, the villain might be something your own company is doing.

That’s why the villain has to be real.

At ThoughtLab, finding that villain isn’t about manufacturing an enemy so we can write a clever headline and ride heroically into battle. It’s about looking closely enough at the customer, the brand, the market, and sometimes ourselves to identify what’s actually getting in the way. Name the wrong villain, and you solve the wrong problem. Name the right one, and suddenly the story becomes clearer. The customer understands what they’re fighting, the brand understands its role, and the marketing has a reason to exist beyond simply asking people to buy something.

Maybe that’s why we love a good villain so much. A great villain doesn’t just give the hero someone to fight. A great villain shows us who the hero really is.

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.