SCENTS of a WOMAN : IN ESSENCE, SHE WANTS A BLEND OF PERSONA AND AROMA
It’s beginning to smell a lot like Christmas.
Ounce for ounce, more perfume is sold during the holiday season than at any other time of year. That means that throughout December, shoppers will be ambushed from all sides by companies fighting for a share of the lucrative fragrance market.
An army of salespeople loaded with spray bottles and perfume samples will lie in wait for prospective customers around every cosmetic counter. Quasi-celebs will fan out into the malls to promote their celebrity scents. Seductive ads for fragrances will infiltrate consumers’ psyches (and stink up the pages of magazines).
With more than 800 fragrances on the market, companies have devised all kinds of tactics to lure buyers. Each fragrance comes with its own arsenal of advertising, marketing, promotions and packaging.
Such selling tactics reach a fever pitch during the holiday season, when 60% of all fragrances are sold, according to Annette Green, president of the Fragrance Foundation, an industry organization in New York City.
The best-selling fragrances appeal to all of the senses--not just smell, she says.
“It’s what you see--the visual imagery surrounding the fragrance, how the bottle feels in the hand and the smell. All three have to be a perfect fit, because you’re dealing with an ephemeral product,” Green says.
The imagery that surrounds a fragrance can come from a celebrity (Elizabeth Taylor), a prestigious place (Tiffany, Cartier), a mood (Joy) or a fashion designer (Chanel, Calvin Klein).
“The imagery has to be very clear,” Green says. “People have to feel the fragrance will make them feel sexier, or more attractive to others or clean and appealing in a sporty way.”
While a celebrity can draw the big crowds at a fragrance launch, they’re usually not as successful as fashion designers in selling scents, Green says. Cher, Joan Collins and Catherine Deneuve are among the many who have come and gone in a whiff. The reason: Their images are often too fuzzy. People don’t know what they stand for, whereas Ralph Lauren and Chanel give off distinct messages.
Still, Taylor has had a hit with Passion and now White Diamonds, because she’s one celebrity whose image is clear, Green says.
“People understand her for her romanticism, her husbands, her glamour, her fats, her thins, her illnesses, her ‘wellnesses.’ We see her as a real person,” Green says.
Excellent packaging that matched Taylor’s image didn’t hurt, either, she says. “ ‘Passion’ was a perfect name, and White Diamonds--what woman doesn’t love gorgeous jewelry? It fits.”
Companies spend years bringing a fragrance from concept to finished product. Nothing about the process is spontaneous. Each detail, from the shape of the bottle to the color of the box, has been agonized over by teams of marketing experts.
“It’s amazing how many different factors play into a fragrance--the packaging, the bottle, the color, the advertising,” says Jacqueline Cohen Steinberg, vice president of corporate marketing communications for Giorgio Beverly Hills.
Giorgio spent two years bringing its latest fragrance, Wings, to market. The scent was formulated by one of the world’s dozen fragrance houses, where skilled perfumers with a keen sense of smell mix together a lot of fragrant “notes” to make a harmonious scent.
Wings was chosen from five fragrance finalists that were submitted to test groups from all over the world. The winning concoction has more than 600 ingredients. It sells for $185 an ounce at the Giorgio Beverly Hills Boutique in South Coast Plaza, Costa Mesa.
To create the right image for the perfume, the company delved into women’s psyches.
“We conducted research throughout the world, talking to women about what they thought about life, what they wanted,” Cohen Steinberg says.
Giorgio decided women were looking for “emotional freedom,” an escape from their many responsibilities. Wings was born, along with the slogan, “Set Your Spirit Free.”
Before the fragrance could take flight, however, Giorgio had to conduct a worldwide search to make sure Wings wasn’t already a trademark name in a foreign country or that the name didn’t have a negative connotation in another language.
“When we introduced Red, the name was the last thing we did. It’s a very difficult process,” Cohen Steinberg says.
The payoff for all that work comes when a company has a runaway hit such as Giorgio, which was the No. 1 scent from 1985 to 1989, or a classic such as Chanel No. 5, which was introduced in 1929 and still makes the Top 10 list in perfume sales. The usual life cycle of a fragrance is two years--and getting shorter.
“A lot of it is timing. The industry has 40 new fragrances this fall. It’s a lot of names, a lot of messages, a lot of clutter,” Cohen Steinberg says.
Often a fragrance strikes a chord because it matches the mood of the day. Calvin Klein’s Obsession fit the self-indulgent ‘80s with its erotic imagery, but since the AIDS epidemic people have grown more conservative, and now Calvin is pushing Eternity for the ‘90s.
“Society has always affected how we perceive fragrances,” Green says. “In the ‘80s, fragrances were sexual, strong, dramatic. In the ‘90s, they’re stepping back. We’re seeing much quieter names, evoking home and hearth.”
The fragrance market has rapidly grown into a $4.8 billion-a-year industry. When Green joined the Fragrance Foundation 32 years ago, the industry hardly existed; there were just a few French companies, compared with the hundreds making fragrances worldwide today.
Men’s fragrances alone generate $1 billion-a-year in sales. Men are splashing on colognes with macho names such as Minotaure--the latest fragrance from Paloma Picasso. Green says the fitness revolution of the ‘80s helped spread the use of cologne, as more men began showing an increased interest in all aspects of grooming.
Adding to fragrance sales is the trend by women to have a perfume wardrobe of no less than three scents. Women no longer wear one perfume exclusively. Now they choose which fragrance to wear depending on their mood.
“They want their fragrance to convey different messages,” Green says. “We all want to be desirable to other people. We want people to like us.”
No amount of clever marketing can turn a perfume into a hit if people don’t like the smell.
“The most important thing about fragrance is the smell itself,” says Annette Tauber, fragrance buyer for Nordstrom in the Brea Mall, MainPlace/Santa Ana and South Coast Plaza.
Fragrance fads come and go, Tauber says, but those that last “make the customer feel good.”
People might buy a perfume the first time for a spectacular bottle, Green says, but if they don’t like the smell they won’t buy it again. Without repeat buys, a fragrance can’t survive.
“One of the ways we judge people is by their smell,” Green says. “We don’t want to deal with someone in a business, romantic or social setting if we’re antagonized by their smell. I once interviewed Dr. Margaret Mead, who said that in primitive cultures, tribes went to war over the way another tribe smelled.”
Thus, in addition to being an aphrodisiac, a dab of perfume or cologne might just be the answer to world peace.
