On Memory, Restraint, and What Fragrance Taught Me About Marketing in an Age of Abundance

When abundance exists, what makes one choice feel more meaningful than another?

I've been circling some version of that question for months.

It began as a question about artificial intelligence. Then it became a question about marketing. Somewhere along the way it became a question about human judgment itself.

Oddly enough, I found the beginnings of an answer in a bottle of cologne. Although that's not really where the story starts. It starts much earlier. Every home has a smell. Mine smelled of citrus. Not the sharp burst of a freshly peeled orange, nor the sour edge of lemon. Something quieter than that. Softer. Thanks to my grandmother, who would perpetually dry orange peels to make her homemade Punjabi version of marmalade, called Murabba - a word that literally means “square”. The smell of these orange peels as dried in the sun outside our dining room in the balcony seemed to exist permanently in the background, as though the house itself had absorbed it over the years. I never questioned it. It wasn't something I consciously noticed. It was simply home. Like the sound of a particular door closing, or the way sunlight entered one room differently from another. Some things become so familiar that they disappear while you're living with them. Only distance makes them visible again.

Years later, I began noticing something curious about myself. Whenever I walked into a perfumery, I gravitated towards exactly the same fragrances; Bergamot, Orange, Mandarin, Lemon. Without intending to, I kept choosing the same family of scents over and over again. At first, I thought it was preference. Then I realised it was recognition. I wasn't choosing perfumes; I was choosing memories. There's a reason for that.

Unlike our other senses, smell has an unusually direct relationship with memory. Before we have time to analyse a fragrance, we've often already felt something about it. A scent can transport us to another place long before we've consciously identified what we're smelling.

A photograph asks us to remember. A fragrance simply reminds us. Eventually I discovered a fragrance called Blenheim Bouquet by Penhaligon's. The first time I wore it, something unexpected happened. Halfway through the day I stopped. Not because someone had complimented it. Not because it was particularly unusual. For a fleeting moment, I wasn't standing where I was anymore. I was back in the house I grew up in. Not literally, of course. But memory has a strange way of collapsing time. Suddenly I could almost smell the fruit that always seemed to be somewhere in our kitchen. The coolness of the hallway. The familiarity of a place that had quietly shaped me without ever asking to be noticed. The fragrance hadn't shown me something new. It had returned me to something old. That stayed with me. Not simply because it was beautiful, but because it raised a question I couldn't shake.

Why do some fragrances become part of who we are, while thousands of others disappear almost as quickly as they're worn?

The answer, I eventually realised, has surprisingly little to do with perfume. It has everything to do with restraint. The world's finest perfumers have access to thousands of ingredients. They could create fragrances that dominate every room they enter. They could make perfumes so powerful they're impossible to ignore. And yet the fragrances people return to year after year rarely behave that way. The strongest perfume in the room is seldom the one people remember most fondly. More often, it's the one they remember escaping. That struck me as strangely familiar.

Because marketing has spent the last twenty years chasing exactly the same mistake. We've mistaken presence for dominance. We've convinced ourselves that if consumers aren't paying attention, the answer must be to become louder. More campaigns. More platforms. More content. More notifications. More impressions. More visibility. Great perfume quietly disagrees. It reminds us that presence and dominance are not the same thing. A fragrance can fill a room and still be forgotten by dinner. Another can remain close to the skin and somehow become inseparable from the memory of the person wearing it. What lingers isn't necessarily what shouted loudest. It's what was composed carefully enough to become part of someone's memory. I don't think marketing has fully appreciated that distinction. Perhaps because, until recently, we didn't have to. Scarcity protected us. Communication was expensive. Production was difficult. Media was limited. Attention was earned simply by showing up. Artificial Intelligence has changed that. Communication has become abundant. Not better. Not worse. Simply abundant. And abundance changes the economics of everything.

When almost anyone can generate campaigns, headlines, videos, strategies and content within minutes, creating more stops being a competitive advantage. The temptation, of course, is to use the new capability to produce even more. I understand that temptation. I've given in to it myself. But the longer I thought about perfume, the more I began wondering whether perfumers had quietly solved a problem the rest of us were only beginning to encounter.

Because perfumers have always worked in abundance. Thousands of notes. Countless possible combinations. Infinite possibilities. Yet the craft has never been measured by how many ingredients made it into the bottle. It has always been measured by knowing which ones didn't. That feels remarkably relevant. Today we don't suffer from a shortage of ideas. We suffer from an excess of them. We don't lack communication. We struggle to make communication meaningful. The scarce resource isn't creativity. It's judgment.

As I sat with that thought, I found myself sketching something in my notebook. Not a marketing model. A perfume model. I started plotting fragrances according to two simple questions. How loudly do they announce themselves? And how long do they remain with you after they've gone? Slowly, four patterns began to emerge. Some fragrances filled a room, won your attention instantly, and disappeared from memory almost as quickly. Others remained so restrained they barely left an impression at all. A rare few achieved something remarkable. They lingered. Not because they were louder. Because they were more precisely composed. That sketch eventually became what I now call The Sillage Model.

Sillage is a perfumer's word. It describes the invisible trail a fragrance leaves behind after the wearer has walked away. I've come to think it describes brands just as well. The model isn't really about perfume. It's about how anything behaves in an age of abundance. There are those that shout and disappear. Those that whisper and disappear. Those rare moments that shout and genuinely deserve to. And then there are signatures. Quiet. Confident. Recognisable.

The things that stay with us long after they're gone. The framework led me to three observations. The first is what I call The Law of Subtraction. Craft has never been measured by what gets added. It's measured by the discipline to leave out everything that doesn't need to be there.

The second is The Presence Paradox. The loudest things are often the least welcome. Presence is remembered restraint, not volume. The two are easily confused.

The third is perhaps the most important. Memory is the real product. People rarely choose what is objectively best. They choose what feels familiar. What resonates. What reminds them of something they already trust. Recognition has always been more powerful than novelty. And beneath all three sits something even more fundamental. A perfumer doesn't remove eleven notes because restraint is fashionable. They remove them because they can tell which two are actually doing the work. That decision cannot be outsourced. It isn't generated. It is judged. That is discernment.

Which makes me wonder whether we've been asking the wrong question all along. Perhaps the future doesn't belong to those who can create the most. Soon, almost everyone will. Perhaps it belongs to those who know what deserves to remain. I still wear Blenheim Bouquet. Not because it's the finest fragrance ever made. Not because everyone notices it. In fact, most people probably don't. I wear it because every now and then, without warning, it reminds me of my grandmother who gave me unconditional love and a home that no longer exists in quite the same way it once did. That seems like a remarkable achievement. To survive decades not by demanding attention, but by quietly earning a place in memory. I'd rather build brands that way. I'd rather build ideas that way. I'd rather build this project that way. Because in an age of abundance, perhaps the highest compliment we can pay anything we create isn't that it was impossible to ignore. It's that it became impossible to forget.