Case study

What Should A Brand Smell Like?

Translating brand DNA into a signature scent

Initial Problem

In collaboration with a specialist company providing scent solutions for retail environments, BRAND AVIATORS® explored a different dimension of brand experience.

Global brands invest heavily in defining how they look, how they speak and how their stores are designed.

But the retail experience is multisensory.

The question was:

If a brand has a distinctive emotional DNA, shouldn't that DNA also determine how the brand smells?

The ambition was not simply to find a pleasant fragrance for a store.

It was to create a brand scent.

Diagnostic Insight

Most scent development begins with fragrance preferences, olfactory trends or descriptions of the desired atmosphere.

We started somewhere else:

the motivational DNA of the brand.

Using THE WHEEL OF MOTIVES®, we decoded the brand's deeper emotional territory and then asked how that same meaning could be expressed through olfaction.

A fragrance can feel reassuring or provocative, familiar or exploratory, sensual or controlled, energizing or calming.

These associations meant scent could become another component of the brand's semantic system.

The challenge therefore changed from:
“Which fragrance smells good?”

to:
“Which fragrance smells like this brand?”

Intervention

BRAND AVIATORS® worked with the scent specialist to translate the brand's motivational DNA into an olfactory brief.

The motive became the starting point for selecting and combining fragrance characteristics that expressed the same emotional territory as the brand.

The process connected:

Brand DNA → motive → emotional meaning → olfactory cues → signature fragrance → retail experience.

Different fragrance directions could then be assessed not simply according to preference, but according to their emotional congruence with the brand.

The selected scent became an invisible expression of the positioning—diffused through the retail environment as part of the total customer experience.

The brand could now be recognized not only through what customers saw and heard.

It could also be experienced through smell.

Before → After

Before

The visual identity communicated the brand.

Communication expressed the brand.

Store design expressed the brand.

But scent risked being treated simply as environmental decoration—something pleasant added to improve the atmosphere.

This created a potential sensory disconnect.

A store could look like the brand while smelling like almost any other brand.

The opportunity was to bring another human sense into the same emotional system.

After

The brand's motivational DNA was translated into a distinctive signature scent for the retail environment.

Fragrance was no longer an ambient addition.

It became another executional expression of the brand strategy.

Customers entering the store could encounter the same emotional meaning through multiple sensory channels: visual identity, materials, space, communication, human interaction—and now olfaction.

This created the potential for a more coherent and immersive brand experience.

And because smell is experienced continuously within a physical environment, the brand's emotional territory did not need to depend exclusively on messages or logos.

The environment itself could communicate the brand.

Once the emotional DNA of a brand is understood, perfumers and scent specialists can receive something much more strategically precise than “make it premium,” “make it fresh,” or “make it modern.”

They can receive an emotional design brief grounded in the motive the brand seeks to own.

Brand strategy becomes sensory strategy.

And sensory strategy becomes physical experience.

The Principle

A brand should not only look and sound like itself. It should feel—and even smell—like itself.

Human beings experience environments through multiple senses, yet brands often manage those senses independently.

THE WHEEL OF MOTIVES® provides a common emotional code capable of connecting them.

Once the brand's motivational DNA is identified, that meaning can be translated into color, form, texture, sound, language, behaviour—and scent.

The objective is not sensory decoration.

It is multisensory emotional congruence.

Every sensory signal should tell the brain the same emotional story.

Don't choose a fragrance for the store. Create the fragrance of the brand.

Have a similar challenge?

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