Beyond Logos and Jingles: Why Every Brand Needs a Scent Strategy

Every brand has a scent—whether designed or not. Some are intentional, like the crisp citrus in a luxury boutique, the warm vanilla in a hotel lobby or that satisfying “new” smell of a premium product. Others are accidental. Think synthetic residues, lingering adhesive from packaging or the mop and bucket that cleans your office lobby. What many brand leaders don’t realize is that these smells carry more emotional weight than a logo, a jingle or a carefully crafted message. They directly shape how people perceive and remember a brand in ways that can last a lifetime. The question isn’t whether your brand has a scent. It’s whether you’re in control of it. 

It’s not marketing. It’s neuroscience.

There’s science behind why scent is so powerful. All other senses—sight, sound, touch, taste—route through the brain’s sensory bottleneck called the thalamus before heading to the cortex for processing and then finally to our centers of emotion and memory. Scent bypasses all of this. It goes straight to the amygdala and hippocampus, the brain’s emotion and memory headquarters. This direct connection explains why smell can instantly transport us to another time or place, a phenomenon known as the Proust Effect, after the French novelist who wrote about how the scent of madeleines brought him instantly back to childhood. Memories triggered by scent are among the most potent and enduring we form. Once created, they rarely fade. 

In practical terms, a scent can create an emotional bond with your brand that no visual identity or tagline can replicate. Your brand’s scent could be the harsh cleaning chemicals the janitor crew uses at dawn, or it could be something that sparks lasting memories and builds strong customer loyalty. Most brands leave this to chance, but doing so surrenders one of your most powerful tools for emotional connection.

The power of ritual and place 

Humans have long used scent to mark sacred spaces and deepen emotional experiences. In ancient Babylon, temples burned specific incense to distinguish divine spaces from the ordinary world outside. Frankincense used in Catholic Mass symbolizes purification and sanctification, its smoke carrying prayers so that blessings can come down. Jewish Havdalah ceremonies pass around sweet-smelling spices to comfort the soul as Shabbat ends. 

Your brand is already creating these kinds of “spaces” for people to inhabit, whether physical locations or the rituals and communities built around your products. Scent has always been a tool for making these spaces more powerful, memorable and transformative.

Brands doing it right

Consumer research shows that ambient scent increases brand recall, shopping time and purchase behavior. It can even influence emotional evaluation or how positively people perceive a brand or environment. It’s easy to envision brands designing nostalgic scents for Baby Boomers and Gen X that evoke the early 80s (Madonna, anyone?)—or new scents that let younger generations experience eras they never lived through.

Some companies already get this. SoulCycle’s signature grapefruit candle by Jonathan Adler fills its studios and has become so integral to the experience that riders buy it for home use. More than exercise, they’re selling a way to recreate that feeling of transformation and community in your own living room. Hospitality and retail learned this lesson years ago. Westin Hotels’ “White Tea” signature scent and the Ritz-Carlton’s location-specific fragrances all create immediate recognition and emotional connection. In retail, Abercrombie & Fitch’s “Fierce” scent and the woody notes throughout Restoration Hardware stores demonstrate how scent can become as central to identity as visual design.

Even cultural institutions are experimenting. The Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle recently became the first museum to create a custom fragrance for visitors to take home. When asked about the decision to incorporate fragrance, Michele Y. Smith, the museum’s CEO, shared, “Scent is one of the most powerful tools we have to spark memory and emotion. With this fragrance, we’re extending our mission into a new sensory dimension.”

And perhaps most striking: the TV show Yellowstone launched a fragrance line estimated to have generated over $50 million at retail—the highest revenue across its licensed products. Fans don’t just want to watch the show; they want to inhabit its world. Scent gives them a way to bring the rugged, authentic spirit of the Yellowstone ranch into their Monday morning routine. 

Why this matters now

We’re living through a crisis of trust. Consumers’ faith in large organizations and institutions is eroding while their hunger for authentic connection with smaller, more focused communities is exploding. The best brands create rituals in people’s lives. If you’ve built genuine trust around an experience—whether you’re an emerging sports team, a niche fitness concept or an influencer with deep expertise—you have something precious. 

While companies spend billions on logos, visual identities and experiential marketing, scent offers a direct route to the emotional core of loyalty. It strengthens memory, creates emotional anchors and transforms brand interactions into multisensory experiences. In volatile markets where attention and trust are scarce, scent can be the strategic lever for differentiation, retention and recall. 

Building your scent strategy

Scent only works when it’s tied to meaningful rituals and spaces that matter to your audience. Brands that create consistent, emotionally charged experiences for their customers are best positioned to benefit. Here’s a framework to get started:

• Map your brand’s “cathedrals.” Identify the spaces—physical or digital—where your audience connects most deeply with you. These fall into three categories: temporal rituals like weekly content drops, spatial rituals in locations where your brand comes alive and community rituals that create shared belonging. Wherever your brand evokes emotion, scent can amplify it. Ask yourself: When do people set aside time specifically for your brand? Where do they go to experience what you offer? Understanding these rituals is the foundation of everything that follows. 
• Understand your infrastructure. Different brand types require radically different approaches. Physical-first brands like retailers and hotels have obvious spaces to scent first. Digital-first brands like influencers and online communities will need to create products that establish scent memories in people’s homes or routines since they lack physical touchpoints. Understanding your infrastructure determines your steps and where you put your effort.
• Choose your path. Your brand type determines your optimal sequence. Physical-first brands can start by scenting core experiences at peak emotional moments, then developing take-home products that extend those associations. Digital-first brands might begin with product creation since they have no physical space to scent.
• Design the right application. The product format must authentically extend your brand’s ritual and enhance people’s lives. Get this wrong, and you’re just selling expensive air fresheners. An outdoor design influencer’s mosquito-repelling candle serves their audience’s genuine needs while establishing scent association. A cookware expert’s dish soap becomes part of the daily ritual they’re teaching.
• Test before you scale. Treat scent like any other strategic investment: before wide deployment, pilot, measure impact through sensory panels with trained evaluators, gather direct customer feedback, then refine. 
• Roll out consistently. Begin rollout across your most important “cathedrals” where your brand connection is strongest. Install consistent scenting in flagship locations, introduce signature scents at peak emotional moments for your audiences and train staff on scent’s role in experience. Once core deployment proves successful, expand to secondary touchpoints like franchise locations, pop-up experiences and partnership activations. Maintain consistency while allowing for location-appropriate adaptations.
• Build natural extensions. Fragrance businesses are highly profitable, and extensions flow naturally once scent associations are established. Sequential product families, seasonal variations and subscription models each reinforce the original scent association while creating new ways to generate revenue with high margins.

A.I. and the democratization of scent  

Thanks to advances in olfactory intelligence—A.I. specialized for scent—creating sophisticated fragrance strategies no longer requires massive budgets or years of development. Modern scent design can transform words, images or detailed brand descriptions into unique fragrances in days, not months. A.I.-powered scent platforms can now generate candidate fragrance formulas from textual descriptions, locate them on odor maps to ensure uniqueness and optimize for factors like sustainability and cost. What once required months of trial-and-error development can now happen in iterative cycles of days or weeks. Scent strategy is becoming as accessible and data-driven as visual and audio branding. By translating brand language, imagery or rituals into unique fragrance profiles, A.I. enables a level of creativity, precision and scalability previously out of reach. This democratization means authentic brands of all sizes can now compete with scent sophistication once reserved for luxury giants.

The bottom line

Fragrance is a psychological antenna, a ritual tool and a memory engine that taps into something as old as human civilization. In a world where emotional connection and loyalty are harder than ever to secure, scent represents an underused lever hiding in plain sight. The technology to design and deploy sophisticated scent approaches has never been more accessible. The science behind scent’s impact on behavior has never been clearer. Brands that embrace scent as a core strategy won’t just smell better, they’ll perform better. The question is no longer whether your brand has a scent. It’s whether you’ve decided what it should be.