mini-branding Part 1

Your brand is not your logo, your color scheme, your PR or even your product. Your brand is the feeling people have when they think of you.

I had a boss who worked at the happiest place on earth, and always mentioned that the coffee shops on Main Street would place vanilla extract in warming trays and blow it through their vents and out to the street to entice people in. One of my favorite places to meet up in Santa Fe is at the Sage Bakehouse because of their open-air bakery; I just need that intense smell of bread baking every once in a while. (Tip: try the current scones; they melt in your mouth.)

Odor information is easily stored in long-term memory and has strong connections to emotional memory. This is possibly due to the olfactory system’s close anatomical ties to the limbic system and hippocampus, areas of the brain that have long been known to be involved in emotion and place memory, respectively.

If I were to ask you, “What does your business smell like?”, how would you respond? Remember, a bad smell does not always have a negative connotation. Does money have a pleasant smell? Maybe not, but who wouldn’t want the smell of money in their nose?

I used to go on web checks for my publishing work back when the web was a physical machine half a block long. The first time I went “on press”, I walked into the noisy pressroom somewhere in southern Illinois and smelled ink on paper running through a machine at breakneck speed. They were printing the cover of Indian Artist magazine with Sherman Alexie’s face and long black hair visible from where I walked in, high above the press floor. That memory comes back clearly to me whenever I open a magazine “hot off the presses” and I catch a whiff of the first pressroom I was ever in.

Translating that smell to an emotion takes a little mapping. Emotionally, I feel a combination of sadness/longing and excitement. Sad because those days are gone; it’s rare that a magazine would send their art director on press, the economy being what it is. But the memory of the smell reminds me of the work itself, being in charge of a fast-paced critique of color, density, and registration. I made split-second decisions with alacrity; it was fun and energizing.

Do you remember mimeographs? The blurry purple type that bled into the paper on the homework your second-grade teacher handed out on a crisp autumn day at school? Did you feel special? That you received something just for you, like a gift? What if, in the future, kids are given iPhones as easily as we received mimeographs? How special, included and important would that make them feel?

HOMEWORK: Spend some time playing with the idea of your company’s scent. What memory do you want to instill in your next customer?

In Part 2 of MinBranding, we’ll work on Brand Story and practice writing one!

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You can receive MiniBranding consulting from Whitespace Creative in person or online. Visit www.whitespacecreative.com or email mel [at] whitespacecreative.com.

Above photoo is a file from the Wikimedia Commons.