This isn’t just about chicken

I was walking past a few small street-side shops looking to buy milk when I caught a whiff of something oddly familiar.

Spicy. Oily. Crispy.

Without even thinking, I said out loud: “Damn. Smells like KFC.”

But here’s the weird part: There was no KFC in sight.

Just a guy deep-frying chicken in a massive kadai. No branding. No signboard. No Colonel.

And yet… my brain instantly went there. To buckets. To jingles. To that red-and-white box you can spot across a food court.

That’s when it hit me.

KFC isn’t a brand. It’s a memory shortcut.

Back when I started learning branding, I thought you just needed a logo, a nice color palette, and some Canva posts.

Make it pretty. Post consistently. Done. But no matter how nice our deck looked, people would forget us a week later.

I thought it was a visibility problem. Turns out, it was a sensory problem.

KFC doesn’t just exist in your head. It lives in your nose, your ears, your eyes. And after all this writing I actually went to eat at a KFC 😂

Let’s break it down:

• Scent: The fried chicken smell is so iconic it triggers brand recall even when it’s not theirs.

• Sound: Their jingle has been remixed and reused for decades.

• Sight: Red and white. That bold sans serif font. And of course, the Colonel’s face.

• Touch & Taste: The crunch. The spice. The greasy fingers. It’s messy on purpose. It’s memorable.

That’s not just marketing. That’s multi-sensory memory design.

I used to believe people remember what you say. Now I know: people remember how you made them feel. Especially when you trigger multiple senses.

Great brands embed themselves into daily life. The best ones? Into muscle memory. So here’s the takeaway:

If you want your brand to stick, go beyond aesthetics.

Think like a scent. Sound like a memory. Look like a ritual. Don’t just be recognizable. Be unmistakable.

Like a whiff of fried chicken on a Chennai street. If you’re building a brand that people can’t stop thinking about...

You need more than good design. You need a strategy that hits all senses.

That’s what I teach inside The Brand Engine. It’s not a branding course. It’s a system for building brand recall.

So when someone walks past something that looks like you…

They say your name.

Do you want your brand to smell like success (not desperation)?

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