For Nissan, a Designer Fragrance to Float Among Its Cars at the Auto Show Joel McCall is creative director of George P. Johnson, the firm that designs and builds stands for the Detroit auto show and other auto shows. He walks through the show floor with a different mission from the average visitor. He spent months strategizing the form of Nissan's stand, down to every shape, sound - and smell. The stand offers its own brand signature fragrance. Having filled sight and sound with videos and pounding rock 'n' roll, stand designers at the Detroit show are adding another sense: scent. Fragrance is a new channel for branding. Mr. McCall said, "Smells bring memory, like music brings memories." So when Mr. McCall walks the show floor he sees - that is, smells - it differently than most of us. His nose notes mostly background noise: the smells of new carpet and plasticlike high pressure laminate, the rubber and metal of new cars and, perhaps coming from the kitchen behind Audi, a hint of weisswurst. The fragrance is part of a high concept stand design for Nissan. It takes the form of an amphitheater, Mr. McCall said, with rising levels of floor in a circular layout. Overhead, a hovering structure called the halo carries images and lights. The space is supposed to bring people together. Images and sounds play off the walls. Vaporizerlike machines softly emit the fragrance from beneath the floor levels of the stand so subtly that many visitors will not notice it. To devise the scent, Nissan and George P. Johnson turned to Air Aroma, an Australian company that specializes in what it calls scent marketing and counts Hilton and Quantas among its clients. Air Aroma was asked to produce a fragrance that was "modern, vibrant and exacting." The company described the result as "fresh, luxurious and oriental fragrance" with notes of green tea. The Nissan fragrance was first tried out at the Paris auto show in September. When the project began, the designers naturally thought first of new car smell. "That is the kind of conversation we are having right now," he said. What is that smell, and how to do we do it the right way? "The architecture is simply the envelope for the experience," Mr. McCall said. You've got to do the whole thing at a stand today. You can't just do some music, do some video. It is the Apple experience. The stand now has to be a retail environment where you feel everything the brand is trying to say. Nissan was concerned that the smell not become overwhelming, as in some shopping malls. "If you take a store like Abercrombie and Fitch, you are dealing with the scent in a contained space," Mr. McCall said. At the Nissan stand, it is far more subtle. He said that in the future there may be different smells that serve different areas of the stand. In between, coffee beans work to define border or cleanse the nose - perhaps like sherbet between courses of a gourmet dinner. Nissan's fragrance, along with other elements of amphitheater design and the branded scent and music track, will go to 10 more shows, evolving along the way. Shiro Nakamura, the design chief, had to approve the fragrance. Mr. Nakamura said "it is very refreshing, rather organic, not too strong."