Brand sillage

Francis Zierer on “sillage” as the defining brand attribute of our times. 

In fragrance, sillage is how much a scent lingers, or what’s left when you leave the room. A fragrance’s sillage starts in the chemical composition. The base notes leave the strongest wake. The base notes of the scent I wore while writing this essay: amber, musk.

Zach Seward’s recent reflection on the trajectory of the media company he cofounded, Quartz, begins with media exec Jim Spanfeller telling him, "It's impossible to kill a media brand." Of course it’s possible, but the other risk in this era of filler and slop is a brand that doesn’t linger while it’s alive. It has no brand sillage.

In Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge, main character Maxine is introduced to a professional nose named Conkling Speedwell as she leaves an appointment with their mutual therapist:

Sillage is a choice, a weapon. There is a time for hard-bottomed shoes that announce your approach; there is a time for supple, high-tech rubber soles that erase the sound of your steps. Not everybody can pull off such announcements of self. (As an author, Pynchon has refused the mantle of the public figure—and in kind, it is his work that lingers.) 

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Certain ingredients have low sillage and almost always have to be falsified. When Dirt editor Daisy Alioto and I spoke to Trey Taylor, the nose behind new fragrance brand Serviette, for Tasteland, he explained that “there’s no real, natural citrus smells that project” very well. This is why “any citrus candle you find smells like cleaner.” Citrus is a top note. My top notes while writing this essay: clementine, bergamot, fig. 

Taylor told us most of the people who’d bought a bottle from Serviette had done so without smelling it. At the time, there were only two shops stocking the perfume in-person, both in New York City, and the majority of his sales were to shoppers farther afield.

That these hundreds of customers checked out online is an expression of digital sillage—the impression formed in their minds by the months of videos and vignettes posted to Serviette’s Instagram channels leading up to the brand’s launch; the reputation formed. A brand’s sillage is made stronger by a real-world activation; a digital presence only engages two senses, sight and sound.

“Every marketing channel sucks right now,” writes Andreessen Horowitz’s Andrew Chen in a piece that wound through LinkedIn like a plume of Chanel No. 5 last week. “When marketing channels work, everyone jumps in on them, and they start to decay like crazy,” he says, like tiny, volatile citrus molecules evaporating quickly. 

The stream of content published online on even a daily basis is unfathomably wide. Tweets, Instagram posts, newsletters, TikToks, YouTube videos, “skeets,” let alone articles from traditional publishers, television episodes, and movies. Reposts of reposts of reposts. Brandweavers, creators, marketers, and spinners all seek to leave a uniquely recognizable sillage in the drift. “The natural solution points towards Little Channels, which are all the smaller marketing strategies that are tried in the early days and abandoned over time,” says Chen. 

So many organizations have heaving content teams managing a half-dozen channels or more. They speak of zigging where others zag. The difficulty is that half of their peers adopt the same philosophy; it’s a race to zig first or furthest. When Duolingo began letting their green owl mascot fly a freak flag at the start of this decade, a cascading stream of marketing thought leaders took to strategy meetings, then blog posts, LinkedIn breakdowns, and Instagram-Reel case studies to proselytize on behalf of “unhinged marketing.”

Duolingo’s brand sillage was strong (here I am writing about it). Perfumers cannot, I learned from Taylor, copyright a scent, but they can copyright specific ingredients.

Perfumers trade these formulae. 

Back in Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge, shortly after being introduced to professional nose Conkling Speedwell, Maxine asks him how he enjoys the job.

It’s hardly different in marketing. This executive or that creative director completes a stint here and goes there, to much ballyhooing and AdAge press-releasing. They try their tactics and recipes with the copyrighted ingredients of their new employer; intellectual property gets deployed to the same old digital fronts in fresh formations, or at least formations not attempted in three generations of executives.

Perfumers like Taylor, or digital creators from nowhere, with no institutional training, who’ve had to teach themselves their own recipes, who couldn’t afford GCMS readouts and had to reverse-engineer their own, often end up getting the recipe they sought to replicate wrong, and in their error create something truly new.

Overapplication of a scent increases the sillage, but it’s not a move that works for most people. Daily social media posts and weekly marketing email pushes can only do so much. The base notes hold the truth. The same rules now apply to the venture capital firms (like Andreessen Horowitz, where Andrew Chen works) which are increasingly acting like media companies. 

“It’s not secondary to the work of investing—it’s an inseparable part of how deals are won or lost. And in a world of infinite noise, founders don’t just pick capital. They pick the ideas they want to bet their careers on,” writes Paul Smalera this week. Sillage might be the defining brand attribute of our times.  

A stranger walks by you on the street and their musk turns your head. The sound of their shoes on the sidewalk comes to the fore among all the other street sounds. You will never see them again; you will catch the same whiff in fifty years’ time and remember the sound of their footsteps. And if the shoemakers hired spinners with any sense, you’ll remember the make of the shoe.

TREY TAYLOR ON TASTELAND