How the right sound and scent can enhance your brand

0:11Hello and welcome to The Entrepreneurs on Monocle Radio, the show all about inspiring people, innovative companies and fresh ideas in global business. Today's episode is a multi-sensory experience as we turn to the business of scent and sound. First, we hear from the founder of a sonic branding studio who's turning his creative instincts to the world of fragrance. The best brief you can give us is actually one that has sound in it. Give us sound because from sound we can instantly translate how that may come to life in scent because if you give us sound we can translate that better than any other sensory mode.

0:47And later, we meet the founder of a British audio company that's built a loyal following with its design-led high-performance systems. We think we make wonderful products. And when people discover our products and then they get it home, they send us an email saying, you know, I've never heard my music sound so good. We do what we do for the love of music, really, I guess. This is The Entrepreneurs with me, Tom Edwards.

1:18You're listening to The Entrepreneurs. Max De Lucia is the co-founder of DLMDD, a global agency that helps brands define how they sound, and now, how they smell. Trained as a composer and shaped by a career in music and across media, Max has worked with clients like Amazon, Singapore Airlines and Mini to craft sonic identities. More recently, his team launched Scent by DLMDD to explore the role of fragrance in brand experience. Max stopped by Midori House to explain why scent is the next frontier. I began by asking him what a sound branding expert is doing in the world of fragrance. My background, the background of all my business partners is in the world of sound, and we've set up a relatively successful agency that works with brands all over the world on their sound identities.

2:06And I suppose the move into scent comes from, well, many things, you know, a passion from my side. I've always liked scent. I've absolutely no knowledge in it whatsoever. So no right to play, I suppose. But sound and scent are brilliantly aligned. You know, they do very, very, very similar things in marketing science and psychology and the ways we live our lives. And I think there's a bit of a shift as well in the worlds of branding and advertising and marketing at the moment where sensorial branding is becoming a bigger thing. We've had clients over the years now say we've done a sound we've created a sound and started to become synonymous for it what do we smell like maybe we should think about that you know what do we taste like all these kinds of things as well and so I've been thinking about it for a while you know a year or so to be honest and then there's that point isn't there where it goes from pub chat to somebody's got to say right we're going to put our steak in the ground we're actually going to do this thing and so we did and the more I've learned about it along the way the collisions if you can call it that or the the the beauty and the marriage of sound and scent is just brilliant a perfumer works in just the same way that a composer works and as i spoke to more perfumers or heard more perfumers talk i thought this is just brilliant you could just change the language the vocabulary just replace the word sound with scent and you're talking in very very similar world so that was the sort of nucleus for it really and it's interesting isn't it because i don't know if it's apocryphal you probably have all the facts and figures at your fingertips but people always say that scent is the most powerful trigger certainly for sort of nostalgia and memory don't they and so i guess you're right if you're thinking what's the glib word holistically about what a brand conjures in the minds and the feelings of its audience of its consumer of its prospects you can't neglect scent do you think that you'll end up being you know the one-stop shop then for these sensorial experiences or do you think already i don't know what what does the early direction of travel tell you about whether people might say can you help us just with this or do you think they might like you to look at everything or does it not really matter well in the first instance i thought well people could come in and say well we've done a sound with you oh great we can do a scent as well they might come in and do scent and say oh you do sound as well but there are definitely the briefs out there in the world where people are looking at both at the same time they're the golden ones and interesting particularly in the middle east where scent is very well understood as a thing in just everyday life and sort of scent brands and scent identities and that idea of sort of fragrance and somebody's identity.

4:29We've seen quite a lot of briefs emanating from that part of the world already that are crossing both. So yeah, I mean, it's either way. People can come in and do one or the other or both. But yeah, I mean, obviously the golden nugget for us would be to have clients coming in and doing both activities would be fantastic. The one-stop shop. So you've mentioned that it made sense to you, but you didn't have the deep background or any background. So to whom do you turn? And you said you're passionate about scents. I'm sure you had your favorite fragrances or perfumers or houses or even these noses who have these famous reputations within the trade.

5:02What did you do? Did you just get in touch? Did you start to go and visit with people? Take us back to that very, very start of the process. Yeah, so the first thought was, right, if we're going to do this, in our sound business, we work with the best composers all over the world to make sound identities for some of the biggest brands in the world. So I thought, right, we're going to use exactly that same methodology here. We're going to go and try and find the best perfumers out there and i thought well in my you know small but passionate knowledge of the world of scent i thought well where would be a good place to start and i'm quite a big fan of the brand molten brown i don't know if you know molten brown but very sort of you know iconic british fragrance brand i thought better find out who the noses are behind who designs you know for molten brown where are these people so a bit of research and you know got a few together they realized there's this family out in the south of france who design some of morton brown's most iconic fragrances so i thought right i'll get in touch oh another trip to the south of france yeah what a shame the suffering i do for my art yeah well it was a little bit more difficult it's good storage a little bit more difficult than that so i thought right get in touch with these people who's got a website haven't they these people have absolutely no website so i thought this is really challenging you know you don't appreciate or you under appreciate maybe because everyone is so contactable when somebody's suddenly not that contactable you become a bit of a detective i suppose i think you know the more difficult it was the sort of the harder i work to try and think well i've got to try and figure out where these people are and who they are so got a family's name the chabert family in the south of france and this place that from what i could see from a business address listed on some sort of business directory in a place called and i thought right no website no no content not even a telephone number and it ended up I'm not joking, on Google Street View with dropping the little man onto the street.

6:45Walking around, trying to find the address of this place, of this perfumers or perfumery, to little success until I got, you know, you can sometimes see the road sign. And so sort of just scribbled it down and wrote an old-fashioned letter saying, you know, I'm Max and I do this thing with this company called DLMDD and we want to start a scent division and love your work and what do you think? and sort of thought nothing, I probably won't even get there. I actually got one of my team who speaks French to translate it. So when I thought, actually, do you know what? We've probably done that really badly.

7:16Let's just send it in English and sort of own it. And then I got an email. I left my contact details. I got an email saying, so nice to actually receive a letter. We never receive letters. Your letters landed on all of our desks. I wrote to all of them. Come and see us. Let's talk more. And they happened to be in London. We had an initial conversation. I went out to South France and have done with a variety of perfumers around the world who we're working with and just started building these connections, these relationships. But that was the story of it. It was funny, you know, it's quite unusual to write an old-fashioned handwritten letter.

7:46Well, I was going to say, and it's amazing. In these kind of, you know, entrepreneurship 101, there's all those things like, you know, don't wait, because the more you find out, the less inclined you're going to be to take the plunge. And this idea, just reach out to people, because the worst that can happen is they don't get back to you, right? I mean, it's a cliche because it's so often true. Yeah, and people love it, don't they? Especially when, if you go for a very specific thing and you've obviously done your research. But the more I found out about perfumers and how they work, I just thought this is almost too good to be true.

8:16You know, sometimes it is. But I thought, well, this is great. These worlds are so well connected to one another. And I thought, actually, this is great as well because it's quite nice to, I think, I might be wrong, but I think we're the first agency to bring together these sensory modes under one roof. At least I hope we are. And it's quite nice to be the first. I'm sure other people probably jump on it as well. But it's my prediction for where the future is. But it's quite nice. I'd like to be able to put a stake in the ground. So hopefully we're the first. Hey, well, for now, write in, complain about Max's remarks.

8:44Challenge him. Exactly. It strikes me that you'll be ready to, you can discuss it. You can debate it with somebody. Yeah. So you've reached out to some key people in this sector. The walls come down a little bit and you start to get into it. Talk to me about these sort of phases of development. Because I find this really, really interesting. and again to get into the interrogate the sort of mechanics of then moving the process forward you've got this sort of discovery phase creation activation explain to us how how that works because it's really interesting yeah so it follows exactly the same format developing a scent identity follows exactly the same format as developing a sound identity which is first of all just to figure out what we're actually doing yeah why are we in the room what do you want to achieve and typically for any brand looking at any part of their identity it starts with a boardroom thing of we should probably have a scent it'd be great to have a scent we can be iconic for a scent but of course most people doing that have never done it before in their lives so that first bit of the process is just grounding everyone in what we're trying to achieve what is the brief here and that exciting thing of figuring out what is the brand's objective in doing this exercise but also what are the possibilities and so once we start all of our work with the discovery phase that looks at that paints all the possibilities and then starts to actually narrow narrow it down a little bit it starts to be a little bit more particular so we are translating a brand's values and all of its tenets all the things that brands have very very well established in their armory you know if you're a brand and you don't really know who you are you're probably doing something wrong you know the best brand clients we work with have very established principles for who they are and what they are and then we're translating those into what could that smell like and it's a phenomenal process because in scent there's a thing called the scent wheel which is basically the spectrum of scent so all of the different scent families from sort of you know fruity from aquatic through to sort of gourmand or the whole sort of spectrum of scent and it's an amazing thing if you write down if we were to do it together now and we had a set of brand identity principles you start to smell around this scent wheel and we do it sort of live you know with fragrance real fragrances in the room and it your brand starts coming up in all these myriad of different ways and you can start to go well probably not that but that feels so something about that over there that felt really really really right for us but conversely actually then you showed us this thing over here and that was great as well because that sort of captures this part of our brand and so we're going through that process of figuring out what are these different aspects what different parts of this scent will could translate your brand and once we've got that as in the very first instance we've got some key commercial references that we can hang our hat off and that we can start to say well perhaps our brief begins to smell like this you know in an identity sense so that's step one and then i guess step two i don't know each phase i guess is in its own way critical and exciting but maybe the sort of the creation when you then get to go i guess and speak with your master perfumers and say look you know here's the deep research this is what it tells us what happens then is that collaborative do you have to then entrust them do they sort of i imagine i'm almost like sort of mad sorcerer going going away and stirring things up how does that next creative bit work yeah it's great i mean on that point going to a perfumer studio and it is that is the perfect blend we say in our sound business you know that what we do is the sort of blend of of art and science but it couldn't be more true in scent with a master perfumer because in their labs you know it is it looks like a scientific workshop a scientific laboratory but it's inherently artistic at least the ones i've been in there's the sort of creative studios which feel like sort of artist studios of the sort of ideas generation.

12:21And then there's the very sort of technical side of it as well, where you've got everybody in white lab coats working away. And yes, so once we've got a brief established and we know what we're trying to achieve from a sort of hero perspective, then it's to brief the master perfumers. And yeah, all of our work is deeply collaborative. You know, we don't just sort of go away and come back and say, here's the scent, there you go, you know, enjoy, goodbye. There's a huge amount of bringing, I think the joy for us is taking our clients into those environments and actually having a hand and being involved in the iteration and development of the thing.

12:55It's a brilliant thing. In fact, it's a sort of career memory, I think, for a lot of our clients. So, yeah, it's that collaboration between Master Perfumer, who's obviously the North Star vision in guiding things, but taking everyone on that journey as well and being the torchbearers of it. That's good. And I guess, what about evolution? Because I suppose it's interesting, isn't it? sometimes you get brands who are quite flighty they're jumping from one thing to another or a new cmo comes in they want to change everything around how does it work with scent is that the same as any other brand facet and it can be a journey that you go on or if you have something iconic martin brown or any others of chanel fragrance whatever it might be is the value in not changing at all i guess what works for one doesn't necessarily work for the other yeah i think that's a really interesting point about you know the sort of the fundamentals of identity particularly in anything sensorial there has to be that commitment to that singular thing we get it a lot a lot clients say you know with our assets can we have different iterations of them and the more you iterate the more you dilute the original thing it's a bit like saying you know have nike changed the visual logo and that's funny because i guess as you walk around you might hear i don't know a sound door creaking a certain way or the sound of a railway or the echo in a certain room and i guess these days everyone's got an iphone right you can quickly record something fragrance it's a bit more nuanced what happens if you are experiencing a scent or a particular i don't know somewhere how do you do you have to you know is it jot it in a notebook try and write it down or because you can't quite capture it in the same way as you can with a visual or even with a sound recording what happens when that happens yeah it's an interesting question i mean you know that's why in honesty i've you know gone to some of the world's best master perfumers who've got that catalogue it's amazing thing you know talking to them and getting to know some of these amazing perfumers around the world is they can deconstruct a scent you know immediately smell it and know what is in it obviously i'm not claiming to have that skill at all i don't but i have done some workshops and been in the room where you come to know you smell a famous scent ck1 for the sake of argument and when you are presented with the ingredients that make up that thing when you smell it you almost feel like they're having you on so that scent that iconic scent that's very recognizable let's say ck1 in this example and then they they say is made up of these you know five or six core ingredients and you smell them and you think how on earth can that thing become that thing it doesn't make sense you know to the sort of untrained nose like myself but it's amazing it genuinely is you know that you put these different things together in the pot and stare it around you know in simple terms and it makes that that iconic thing so to answer your question how you would you know note down or capture the you just wouldn't because you can you can at least me work backwards from that at all but perfumers can and it's an amazing skill and do you think when if you're going to say i was in you know i don't know would it be in i was in a cathedral in a certain city and this moment struck me and the light was like this and this was the sound and the scent was and you can't describe it can they use those other cues can they almost work back do you see what i mean with the sort of peripheral detail that you give them are they that skilled it's almost like mind reading i guess yeah well it's sort of start to straddle into the world of synesthesia as well which is that if you hear something you can smell it and some of these perfumers you know have have that amazing thing you know and actually i've been told the best brief you can give us is actually one that has sound in it give us sound because from sound we can instantly translate how that may come to life in scent so obviously for us that's brilliant as the lifeblood of our core agency tlmdd is in sound so i thought that as well you know to have a perfumer say the best brief you can give us give us give us the words and give us some visuals and show us the the person that we're designing for the audience that we're designing for but give us sound because if you give a sound we can we can translate that better than any other sensory mode was another sort of bit of a eureka moment yeah i hope no um look you just said best brief last question what's the dream assignment you don't have to name a specific brand but is there a thing where you know followed this to its logical conclusion you'd be like ah my work here is done what would that what would that look like you maybe maybe you've already done that in your audio work but what about in this yeah kind of so i've on a personal level always felt that the brilliant sort of industries for our work particularly are in travel and aviation you know always had a dream in our sound business we were lucky to fulfill it quite early on of working for some of the world's sort of foremost airlines you know not a budget airline but you know sort of the more luxurious end of the spectrum where you can you can design beautifully you know and we had a knock on the door very early on in our sound business from singapore airlines and we developed the entire sound ecosystem and sonic design for a Singapore airline so from the moment you walk into the lounge and walk into the airport through to you know when you when you board the plane the boarding music the landing music and there are it's just unbelievable this sort of we do a lot of work that is designed you know just to drive a brand just to hit a brand home really really hard and then we get these lovely briefs that are more about experience and sort of beautifying that the travel experience is one for me anyway that's just such a fancy it's like the golden brief and as i say we were lucky to fulfill that early on we worked with singapore airlines and what was particularly interesting about that at the time and you know funny how how worlds collide at the same time that singapore airlines were designing the sound identity we were doing that in tandem with the creation of a scent identity at the same time that was pre us doing any of our scent business or anything but it was this very sort of i guess uh this was some years ago so this was sort of quite the early stages of these worlds starting to collide in this sort of multi-sensory approach so anything in the world of sort of elegant travel for me is the dream because i think that those sensorial aspects are so powerful and so memorable in the traveler experience you go on youtube and just type in singapore airlines boarding music and there are like it's crazy i mean it's got millions and millions of hits fine but there are thousands upon thousands of comments of outpouring you know people outpouring say you know this reminds me of going to see my family here or flying here to do this whatever it might be and it's just you know you sort of really think wow it's nice to do work that people really love you know and that actually genuinely makes an impact and that is always the thing in branding and advertising sometimes you think god you know does anyone actually care about this but when they do and they love it then you enter into something a little bit more special so that's the sort of sector in the space that i'm most excited about and you know already doing some quite interesting things there.

19:35And it's just, it's the perfect playing field for this stuff. That was Max De Lucia, the co-founder of DLMDD. And you can find out more by heading to dlmdd.com and the scentagency.com.

19:58You're listening to The Entrepreneurs. Now we are joined in the studio. I don't know if there's some kind of record, a second week running. It's Fernando Augusto Pacheco. Hello, Faye. Hello. It's been a pleasure to be here on The Entrepreneurs. You know, you're not allowed to just keep inviting yourself back. Maybe you'll be back next week as well. We have strict rules on this. Now, we were talking about, well, Sonic branding and scent, and we're keeping things in the Sonic realm, a name I think probably familiar to our listeners, Faye. Tell me, what is that name and why did it pique your interest this week?

20:28Well, I'll tell you a story, Tom. I was looking for a very chic CD player, and it took me years to find out. Once I read a short review in Monaco magazine written by David Phelan, our technology correspondent, and he was mentioning this brand called Ruark. And then, you know, I had a look at the website. I said, oh, my God, this looks amazing. I bought it. I wrote a piece about it and how kind of I really enjoy the sound. It looks good on my living room. And then, of course, I said, let's talk to the founder. I think it's a great idea. I think it's a great story. You know, it's one of those kind of organic stories that I kind of randomly came across.

21:05But it's really good. And when I spoke to Alan O 'Rourke, who is the founder, he co-founded actually with his father, the company, about 40 years ago. And he's telling me that actually there's a massive market for that. People that want beautiful sound systems in their home. I have to say here, I'm going to promote them because they are good. I have an R3S compact music system with a CD player, of course, in rich walnut. It looks nice. They have different sizes. And we had a great chat. Nice promotional material there, Fernando. Sorry. But it is interesting. I think Rourke is one of those brands that, you know, we often talk in audio about heritage allied to innovation.

21:42You talk about the 40 years of storied history, but of course, being at the cutting edge, all in the service of richness of listening experience. Tell us what you chatted about. Well, we spoke about, you know, the beginnings as well and how he's actually feeling quite optimistic about the future of music systems as well. And people care about the quality of their sounds as well. Rourke was found in 1985. it was a partnership between me and my dad so my dad was a furniture maker cabinet maker and he grew up and left school took up an apprenticeship started making furniture which led him into the early stages of the british hi-fi industry so making cabinets for the likes of hacker radio dinatron and i think that sort of nurtured our love we always had music playing in our house i trained as an engineer with ford motor company i think with his cabinet making skills and my engineering skills we just shared a passion for particularly slow speakers that's what started us we used to make our own speakers as a hobby i did that for quite a few years and and it was a lot of friends and family said you know these are really quite good it was back in the day when stereo just really started to come now it went from mono systems into stereo systems back in those days you'd have like the Concorde taking off and you were trying to recreate the sound of Concorde and the orchestras and the Flying Scotsman, the Steam Train would come, you had these test records you could buy.

23:11So it's very much about trying to recreate the sound of the real live performance in your home and that's what hooked us and I loved it we were just very enthusiastic. But it was in the late 80s early 80s I suppose that with some you know we thought that well perhaps we have something here this is something we could turn into a business so we came up with a few designs there'd be one being the saber was our first bookshelf speaker quite big by today's standards then the broadsword we had and the accolade and we got in our car and started going actually it's a local dealer as well a company called Rayleigh Hi-Fi it's still there today I mean they were the hi-fi shop for the for the sort of Essex area.

23:57And we took them into them to sort of listen and they liked them. They bought a few pairs and then it spread from there, really. That's amazing. And, you know, a brand like yours, of course, you know, since 1985, the music industry have changed so much. But you still make beautiful music players. So there's still definitely a market for that, right? I mean, definitely. I think my dad, being a cabinet maker, he knew how to make cabinets which look good. And I've always loved design anyway. I just love looking at architecture. And I think we sort of realised that in this world of lots of stuff available, you've had to go the extra mile in design to make things which stand out.

24:36And I think even more today, people want products which look good in their homes. Monocle is an advocate of that. You less clutter, buy things which are beautiful. Good design doesn't date. And we very much believe in that. And now products are evolutionary rather than... So they've evolved over time. So you can see the link, the right link is always there. They are real objects, I think, in your music players. So, you know, I have the smaller CD player, the R3S. But you have, for example, the R810, which is... A10. A10, which is like a table almost. It looks amazing. It's a proper kind of statement.

25:19Well, the inspiration for that came from my grandmother. Because she had, when I was a kid, I remember going around there and she had one of the original, like a proper radiogram where it had the turntable built in as well. And some of them had a tape recorder. And it had a shortwave radio in it as well. I could remember just, I think that's where I developed my love for radio as well. Just scanning through the stations, listening to all these, while my mum and my dad were with my grandmother in the other room, i've been in her front room playing with this radio and playing with this radiogram i used to love it and i think radiograms took over from the parlor piano really when pianos were thrown out and people got their radiograms in but um yeah so that was really just another statement piece i mean that's our flagship product but it's you know when you look at what you perhaps you'd go to like conran or heels and you'd pay for a console table for the same price you're getting a complete music system something that looks looks beautiful as well amazing and do do you care as well about the the sound quality as well because one thing my concern with the streaming era if i may say that sometimes the quality of the sound is definitely not as good as when you're listening to vinyls or cds that's a bit of a concern of mine what do you have to say I agree completely.

26:39I think that, I must admit, I do stream a lot. Oh, yeah. Because it's access to new music, things you discover. But that's why I like radio. But certainly, I think that just because it tells you it's a high-resolution stream, you don't know what's happened to that stream all the way down the line. So it may be a 24-bit, you know, 192 kilohertz. That's what it says when it tells you what it is. But it could be an MP3 file they've converted to that. Whereas at least with a record or with a CD, you know it's true 16-bit. You know the quality you're getting with streaming. Now, if there's a restriction in the bandwidth somewhere down the line, then the quality you get isn't going to be the same as that CD or the LP that you're listening to.

27:31So... How do you listen to your music besides the streaming? Do you still have a kind of a vinyl collection or a CD collection? I still have a big CD collection, and I still have all my old records as well, some of which I'm told are worth quite a bit of money. Some original Beatles recordings and stuff like that. And at the moment, we're seeing a little bit of a... certainly a bit of a revival. I think it's lovely to see physical formats. I mean, vinyl is certain back, but what we're hearing is that CDs are... a lot of kids are getting back into CDs again. it's that ownership it's that being able to hold something you know own something of the artist so important it is absolutely who is your customer as well because I do notice that younger people want to buy the CDs sometimes they come with different covers as well are they also kind of approaching perhaps some of your products Roark this kind of slightly younger generation we think we make wonderful products and when people discover our products they tend to buy one then another then they have a whole a whole house full of them they have a you know an r1 in their bedroom an r3 in their living room so it's something that sort of you know so people get into i think it's the design as well um our thing is to spread our word i suppose really you know we're still a small company i think that's the that's a lot of the hi-fi industry is small by comparison to the likes of Sony or Bose getting our names known is quite difficult probably for us being in the likes of John Lewis has been very good John Lewis are one of our you know have a good retailer for us and quite often on the registrations when people find you know where did you discover our products it would be well they say John Lewis saw it in John Lewis and that's where I think the design has been important because initially they're attracted by the look I say all the time if you're you're maybe wandering through a store and you see a okay something will catch your eye it might be a new jacket and you go over and you were never thinking of buying that jacket but when you try it on you think well this feels it looks good so I think it's being visible that's I think that's the trouble with a lot of this you know the better products they're hidden away behind closed doors particularly hi-fi shops you know especially it's hi-fi shops most people feel a bit perhaps afraid of going in feel they need to be knowledgeable of the or very tacky yes they're like oh my god yeah yeah but that's that's really not the way it is some hi-fi stores are starting to sell a bit of vinyl now trying to get people back in and that's what it's about it's a bit like serving nice coffee making the places more inviting but i do think that probably hi-fi stores and the enthusiasts that run it they're not very good at marketing they think that to have a big pair of speakers in the window for instance is going to draw people in but for many people it's probably a big i can't go in there because i they probably think they couldn't afford it they don't know anything about the products whereas as you know with little products like our r3 it's very accessible and beautiful and beautiful and one thing that that we i think that really pleases us a lot of the time is when people do buy products and they bought it initially perhaps seed in store and then they get it home they send us an email saying you know i've never heard my music sound so good and you do think well what have you been listening to all these and then but then they get back into their they listen to their music again and start to seek out new music we do what we do for the love of music really i guess that was alan o 'rourke the founder of rourke and you can find out more by heading on over to rorkaudio.com.

31:29And that's all for this episode of The Entrepreneurs. We'll be back at the same time next week. Do look out for Eureka, which drops every Friday. The programme's produced by Laura Kramer with audio editing by Jack Dewars. And you can find your audio. If you'd like to get in touch with the team, drop a note to Laura. She's on lrk at monocle.com. I'm Tom Edwards. Goodbye, and thanks for listening to The Entrepreneurs.