What a Polaroid on an Emirates Flight Teaches Brands About Being Remembered

On the upper deck of an Emirates A380, past the business cabin, there is a small bar with a curved counter where passengers stand with a glass in hand somewhere above the Arabian Sea. Behind that counter, the crew keeps a Polaroid camera. If you ask, a member of the crew will take your picture, wait with you while the image surfaces out of the grey, and hand it to you inside a card frame carrying the airline's name.

Everything else on board lives on a screen, including the forty photographs each passenger takes of the clouds with a phone and will never open again. That Polaroid is the only image on that aircraft that cannot be retaken or deleted, and it is the one the passenger will still have in ten years.

Why some things get kept, and others don't.

The Emirates Polaroid survives in drawers, and in memory, for a reason that not only applies to luxury. In 1988 the consumer researcher Russell Belk published Possessions and the Extended Self, a paper that still shapes how researchers think about ownership. His argument, put simply, is that we treat certain possessions as part of ourselves, and we keep the ones that carry a piece of our own story. The Polaroid is kept because the person in it is the passenger. The airline sits on the border of the frame, which is where a brand belongs in someone else's memory.

That shifts the brief for any brand. The question now is what your client would choose to keep, and whether it carries their story as well as yours. Sometimes the answer is an object, and sometimes it is a story the client will tell for years, which is harder to design and worth far more.

What brands have learned to leave behind.

At Le Labo, the perfume is mixed at the counter when you order it, and the bottle leaves with a label printed with your name and the date it was made. People finish the perfume and keep the empty bottle on a shelf, because the label reminds them of an afternoon in their own life. The brand's name is on it too, in small type, along for the ride.

The Hermès orange box works differently. It is not personalised, yet people keep it anyway. What it records, and means, is a moment of arrival: the day someone decided they could have this. The brand has made itself into a container for a personal milestone, and the client does the rest.

But sometimes, the case is not an object at all, but a story of care. In 2012 a family came home from the Ritz-Carlton without their son's stuffed giraffe, Joshie. To get the boy to sleep, his father told him Joshie was staying on for a few extra days of holiday. When the hotel called to say the toy had been found, he asked whether someone could photograph it by the pool so the story would stand up. The staff went further. Joshie came home with a binder documenting his stay: by the pool, at the spa, driving a golf cart, and working a shift in the loss prevention office with his own ID badge (the full story is here). The family kept the binder, and millions of people have since heard about a hotel that took a child's world seriously. The binder itself wasn't expensive, its value came from someone at the hotel stepping inside the family's story and leaving the hotel's own story at the door.

The mark of a hand.

Scrolling through social media these past weeks, I came across an artist whose idea stopped me. Painter G Weller sells her large original works together with the palette she mixed their colours on. That palette carries what the finished painting hides, the colours she tried and abandoned before she reached that exact shade, and the dried ridges where her brush stopped while she decided. For the buyer, the painting becomes more theirs, because they now own part of how it was made. And it makes the human hand behind the work impossible to miss, at a moment when so much of what we buy, and more and more of what we look at, could have been made by no one at all.

This is where Belk's idea becomes practical for a small brand. You do not have an A380, or a hotel team with the freedom to photograph a toy giraffe at the spa. You have a process, and a process leaves traces that most founders throw away. A ceramicist could send the test tile where a glaze was first fired. A designer could hand over the first sketch of a logo, the one drawn on the back of a napkin, framed with the date. Each of these is a small piece of evidence that a person made the thing, and that the client was on that person's mind while they did.

If you want to look at your own brand this way, start with what your clients already keep, and ask a few of them directly. Then look at what your process produces that never reaches them, and think whether any of it carries the mark of your hand. The answer may already be in your studio, on its way to the bin.

Back to the frame.

Finding that thing is worth the time it takes. A client who keeps something from your brand has given it a place in their own life, and that is a place no campaign can buy. What people keep almost always has a person in it, the client in the photograph or the maker behind the palette. Long after they have forgotten what they paid, it will still be there, remembering you on their behalf.

Somewhere, in a drawer in Lyon or in Lagos, there is a Polaroid of a woman at a bar above the clouds, a little overexposed, in a card frame with an airline's name along the corner. She will find it years from now while looking for something else, and for a second she will be back on that upper deck. Emirates will be there too, at the edge of the frame, where she let it stay.

Every brand already has something its clients would keep, but finding it often takes a second pair of eyes, because what sits closest to you is the hardest to see. That second pair of eyes is The Reading, our brand consultancy service, where we look at your brand alongside you and give you expert guidance on any question you may have about it. Explore The Reading.

Joshie living his best life.

Crafted with love in Madrid

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