A brand you can “sense”

For decades, brands have fought to claim ownership of colors, shapes, symbols, packaging, melodies, and catchphrases. Coca-Cola has its bottle shape and the color red. McDonald’s has the Golden Arches. Intel spent years building recognition for a mere few seconds of sound.

But what about scent?

It is arguably one of the most underutilized areas of brand identity.

Not because scent is a weak stimulus – quite the opposite. It is exceptionally strongly linked to memory and emotion. The problem lies elsewhere: it is incredibly difficult to claim a scent as the exclusive property of a specific brand.

It is easy to make a hotel smell luxurious.
It is easy to create a scent associated with cleanliness.
It is easy to make a clothing store smell of wood, leather, amber, and perfume.

It is far more difficult to ensure that a consumer smells that aroma outside the store and thinks:

“That scent belongs to that specific brand.”

And that is precisely where the line is drawn between scent marketing and true scent branding.

This is one of the most important questions.

The aroma of fresh bread instantly triggers a specific set of associations: freshness, appetite, a bakery, the morning.

The scent of coffee can evoke a café, energy, pleasure, and a moment of respite.

Citrus notes communicate freshness and cleanliness. Wood, leather, amber, or cedar can suggest premium quality, tradition, craftsmanship, or luxury.

The problem is that these are primarily category codes rather than specific brand codes.

A Distinctive Brand Asset should not only be distinctive but, above all, trigger the correct brand in the consumer’s memory. In the Ehrenberg-Bass approach, the strength of such assets stems precisely from their ability to evoke the brand without the need to display its name.

And this is where scent faces a much more difficult task than a logo, a color, or a distinctive shape.

Color can be placed practically anywhere.

On packaging.
In advertising.
On a website.
In an app.
On social media.

Each time, the consumer receives another exposure that reinforces the connection between the signal and the brand.

Scent is different.

It cannot be displayed on a smartphone screen. It does not work in typical digital advertising. It is absent from billboards. It is difficult to convey via e-commerce. The consumer must physically be in the place where the scent is emitted, open the product, or come into direct contact with it.

This radically limits the number of exposures.

Then there is another problem: scent is difficult to define precisely.

A color can be defined by a code. A melody can be written down. A shape can be represented graphically.

Scent remains far more subjective. One consumer might detect wood, another leather, while a third is reminded of a hotel they visited ten years prior.

Interestingly, this difficulty exists not only at the marketing level but even legally. The EUIPO currently indicates that olfactory trademarks are not accepted because available technology does not allow a scent to be represented in a manner that is sufficiently clear, precise, durable, and objective.

Scent is therefore exceptionally difficult to “own” in two senses: the legal sense and – even more importantly – the mental one.

Therefore, it is worth distinguishing between three levels of scent usage.

The first is the natural scent of the category or product.

Coffee smells like coffee. Chocolate smells like chocolate. A bakery smells like baked goods.

Such an aroma can be highly effective in terms of sales and the customer experience, but by definition, it is difficult to claim as one’s own.

A good Polish example is E. Wedel. The scent of chocolate works very well in conjunction with the factory, the chocolate lounges, and the brand experience. However, it is not a scent that belongs exclusively to Wedel; it is, first and foremost, a category code.

The second level is aromamarketing.

The brand uses scent to make the interior feel more pleasant, premium, calm, or energetic.

This can enhance the customer experience.

Only the third level can be called “scent branding.”

The brand develops its own unique composition, uses it consistently over the years across multiple touchpoints, and consumers begin to associate that specific scent with the brand itself.

And it is precisely this final stage that is achieved extremely rarely.

Massimo Dutti is an excellent example that illustrates both the potential and the limitations of this tool.

A unique signature scent was developed for the brand. According to TRISON, the company behind the project, the composition blends notes such as citrus, ginger, and cypress with jasmine, lavender, Virginian cedar, and oakmoss. This solution was designed as an integral part of the Massimo Dutti in-store experience and is being rolled out internationally.

From a strategic standpoint, everything looks very promising.

The scent is distinctive.

It aligns with the brand’s positioning.

It harmonizes with the natural materials, subdued color palette, store architecture, and premium aesthetic.

Yet, the most important question remains:

How many customers – if they were to smell this fragrance without seeing the logo, the clothing, or the store interior – would spontaneously say, “Massimo Dutti”?

Remove the logo. Remove the interior. Remove the product. Leave only the scent.

Then ask:

“Which brand does this scent remind you of?”

If a significant number of consumers spontaneously identify the correct brand, a genuine asset is beginning to take shape.

If the answers are:

“luxury hotel,”
“high-end store,”
“spa,”
“cleanliness,”
“premium fashion,”
“premium car,”

then the brand has established an association with a category or a positioning.

It has not yet claimed the scent as its own.

The paradox of scent, then, lies in the fact that it is simultaneously incredibly powerful emotionally and surprisingly underutilized as a means of identification.

Marketers have become far more adept at managing what a customer sees and hears than what they smell.

That is why most scent marketing today falls somewhere between merely creating an atmosphere and building a genuine brand asset.

Massimo Dutti has its own “odotype.”

Westin has White Tea.

Singapore Airlines has Batik Flora.

Kazar extends its store fragrance to home products, while Lancerto uses a signature blend in its e-commerce shipments.

These are interesting and often expertly designed systems.

Yet, a signature scent is not yet synonymous with a distinctive scent asset.

Perhaps that is precisely why scent remains one of the most fascinating untapped territories in modern branding.

For true success is not a customer walking into a store and thinking:

“It smells lovely in here.”

We reach the pinnacle only when the aroma alone is enough to trigger one specific thought:

“I recognize this scent. It’s that brand.”