The Inescapable Smell of Your Business.
How the conditions you create define what your customers believe about you.
Like your body, your business has a scent. It exists whether you attend to it or not. From your body, a scent emerges from the chemistry of your physiology—your habits, your diet, your movement patterns. A business operates by the same logic. Its industry is its physiology. Its processes and management practices are its diet. Its products and services are its physical behaviors. Together, these choices create an atmosphere that people sense the moment they encounter you. You cannot not have a brand. The only question worth asking is whether that scent emerging from your company—your brand— arrived by accident or by design.
A scent is not chosen; it emerges. But emergence is not random—it is shaped by conditions. Inputs, habits, patterns, behaviors. Brand works the same way: it is the byproduct of what you consistently do, not what you declare. You don’t control the scent directly. You control the inputs that create it. Conditions shape the chemistry; the scent is merely the consequence.
Despite this, many leaders believe their central challenge is explaining their value more clearly. They polish language, refine messages, and labor over ways to persuade customers of who they are. But humans don’t decide based on what a company says. They make decisions based on the environment a business creates—the atmosphere they inhale the moment they encounter it.
The Psychology of Choice
People are autonomous. You cannot engineer their beliefs, manufacture their conclusions, or move them like pieces on a chessboard, as Adam Smith warned centuries ago.1 What you can shape—what every organization must shape—are the conditions that influence the inferences people make on their own.
This psychology is well-documented. Humans resist persuasion because it threatens their autonomy; they move toward choices they believe originate within themselves. Self-Determination Theory2 reinforces this insight: behavior changes when people feel ownership, not when they feel pressure.
Jim Camp, one of the most respected negotiation coaches of the past several decades, put it bluntly in Start with No: “Facts do not win negotiations,” he wrote. “Facts come later, because they mean nothing to the stomach.” We decide emotionally, instinctively, and then we gather evidence to support the feeling. We all behave this way. We encounter brands we’ve never purchased from yet feel drawn to them. We browse their website, unconsciously searching for clues that validate our instinct—they pay their workers fairly, they’re climate-conscious, they give back. Rationality becomes a scavenger hunt for emotional validation.
Many leaders think of branding as something that looks good on swag, or the more seasoned may think of it as a method to fix a messaging problem—something marketing must solve. In practice, brand is a management function. It emerges from operations, priorities, behavior, pace, and choices: the controllable conditions that form a company’s atmosphere. It is not the story you tell; it is the system you run.
Where This Understanding Began
This question—what can leaders actually control, if not minds?—eventually became the heart of a branding methodology I call Conditions Design. But its origins began long before I had the language for it.
My recognition of this human behavior started early. In a search for financial stability, my father and I moved frequently throughout my childhood. Each new town, each new school, was an unfamiliar ecosystem. Entering those spaces, I learned quickly that people form impressions before they hear your story. You don’t get to explain yourself first—you imply yourself first. I needed to convey that I understood what was happening around me: what mattered, what didn’t, and how people connected. Observation became my survival skill. Long before I understood brand strategy, I understood implication—the quiet signals that tell people what to conclude without ever being told.
Observation helped me belong. I paid close attention to how people behaved, what they responded to, and how they signaled acceptance. I was naturally funny, and observational humor became the quickest path to connection. For my entertainment, I watched experts in observational humor, people like George Carlin, Richard Pryor, and Robin Williams, and without realizing it, their humor introduced me to philosophy. They revealed the human condition with precision—its contradictions, absurdities, and desires—and did so in a way that allowed people to feel seen.
When I entered the world of brand and business strategy, the pattern I’d learned in childhood reappeared. Customers behaved just like those schoolyard crowds. They made snap judgments based on signals organizations didn’t realize they were broadcasting. Pricing implied one thing, responsiveness another, operational rhythms another still. Visual design revealed values. Hiring decisions revealed priorities. Even subtle behavioral details—timing, tone, pace—created meaning. By the time someone read a value proposition, their instincts had already rendered a conclusion. Research confirms what experience whispered: people decide in milliseconds, and analysis trails behind.
The Discipline of Conditions Design
Persuasion is exhausting. It requires constant energy and often leads to fragile belief. Coherence, however—when what an organization does aligns with what it intends to imply—naturally creates conviction. Customers sense truth before anyone articulates it. This is the seed of Conditions Design, a methodology shaped first by lived experience and then refined through formal study.
Over time, I immersed myself in the work of Roger Martin, who reframed strategy as a series of interdependent choices—where to play and how to win—that shape the environment a company creates. April Dunford clarified that positioning succeeds only when it maps to the customer’s goals and triggers the assumptions that lead them naturally toward your value. Daniel Kahneman showed that fast, intuitive thinking drives most decisions, and that slower analysis often steps in afterward—usually to rationalize those decisions, and only occasionally, with real effort, to correct them. Robert Sapolsky’s work shows that behavior is deeply determined by biological and environmental context, and that what we call “intent” is itself shaped by those factors. And Marty Neumeier’s articulation of brand as a “gut feeling” grounded everything in the truth that people respond to what they sense, not what they’re told.
Conditions Design brings these insights into a single discipline. It helps leaders recognize what they control—pricing, operations, behavior, design, pace, practice—and configure those choices so the organization implies the value it hopes to convey. It ties theoretical strategy to lived reality and makes implications intentional.
Rational factors still matter. They screen out the unfit. But once alternatives appear equally rational—which they often do—decisions tilt back toward trust, coherence, and perceived alignment.
What I’ve Observed in Practice
In my work at State of Assembly, the branding agency
and I founded in 2014, I’ve seen that organizations rarely struggle because their value is weak. They struggle because their conditions contradict the value they want to be recognized for. A company may believe it is premium, yet its operations are built for speed over craft. It may believe it is innovative while making decisions that are risk-averse. It may believe it is reliable while tolerating inconsistency. Customers don’t need to articulate these contradictions; they sense them. And once sensed, the organization is forced into explanation—trying to argue what its behavior fails to support.Conditions Design reverses that dynamic. It aligns the signals a company emits so customers sense the value before they analyze it. When the value is obvious, the purchase becomes obvious too.
In practice, I’ve seen this dynamic hold across education, tourism, and professional services. A private middle school couldn’t change the fact that its three-year structure disrupted the K–8 or 6–12 continuity many families preferred, but it could highlight a condition it uniquely served: the critical neurological window of early adolescence. A tourism region couldn’t control its lack of hotels, but it could choose an audience—people seeking a spontaneous day of restoration rather than vacationers burdened by planning—and suddenly a weakness became an implication of ease. A restoration company couldn’t control the chaos of homeowner emergencies, but it could redefine its customer, shifting its operations toward the steadier needs of property managers and transforming crisis work into long-term partnership.
In each case, Conditions Design focused attention on what leaders could actually control, aligning those conditions with the value they wanted people to feel.
Why This Matters Now
There is a reason Conditions Design feels particularly urgent at this moment. In the era of artificial intelligence, explanation has become abundant—any organization can generate polished language instantly. Comparison is effortless, allowing customers to verify whether experience matches story within seconds. And reactance is heightened, as people instinctively distrust anything engineered too neatly to persuade them.
AI can imitate language, but it cannot inhabit character. It can accelerate operations, but it cannot author discipline. AI may help surface the conditions available to a business, but only leaders can choose which conditions to design, strengthen, or remove. The more AI saturates communication, the more advantage shifts to those who align what they control with the truth they want customers to feel.
The Scent You Leave Behind
Looking back, I can see that Conditions Design didn’t originate from a single insight. It emerged gradually—from displacement, from observation, from humor, from a lifelong study of how people recognize truth.
In the end, a brand is a scent: the inescapable smell of your business, an atmosphere people detect instantly. Traditional branding tries to tell people what scent you have. Conditions Design focuses on what you control to shape what your brand actually is. And when you shape the source, customers don’t need to be convinced. They simply smell the scent—and the choice feels obvious.
Zachary Cavanell is the co-founder of State of Assembly, a brand strategy agency in Portland, Oregon. The full methodology of Conditions Design is outlined on the State of Assembly website; what precedes is the story of why it matters and where it came from.
In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith notes that while chess pieces move only when directed, people have “principles of motion of their own.” For leaders, the lesson is clear: organizations aren’t mechanical systems. Employees, customers, and markets respond with their own motivations and judgments. Strategies fail when they ignore this autonomy—and succeed when leaders design systems that work with human agency, not against it.
Self-Determination Theory explains that people perform best when three core needs are met: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. When individuals feel they have meaningful control over their work, the skill to do it well, and a sense of connection with others, motivation and performance rise sharply. For business leaders, SDT underscores that sustainable productivity isn’t driven by pressure or perks—it comes from creating conditions where people feel empowered, capable, and supported.