Fragrance makers marketing strategies… and the love profusion
After turning up their noses at the fragrance counter for years, women are slowly drifting back.
One big reason is that the products have changed: In the casual, dot-com 1990s, fragrance companies flooded the market with fresh, simple scents, the so-called no-fragrance fragrances epitomized by Calvin Klein‘s popular CK One. But then fragrances became so light that many women began to think, “Why bother?” says Deborah Walters, senior vice president for fragrance and cosmetics at Saks Fifth Avenue. In 2001, fragrance sales took a nose dive and fell for two more years.
“There has been too much new-ness,” says Patrick Bousquet-Chavanne, group president of Estee Lauder and chairman of the Fragrance Foundation. “The prestige category unfortunately cannot be sustained if you keep up the rate of product launches.”
To stand out from the crowd and reach new audiences, fragrance makers are expanding their marketing beyond the traditional venue of women’s fashion magazines, while giving a steep boost to their marketing spending, raising the stakes as high as $20 million for a single fragrance launch.
Estee Lauder licensed Madonna‘s recent single “Love Profusion” to accompany ethereal new ads for a lush new floral fragrance, Beyond Paradise. The ads ran in about 10,000 movie theaters, a first for a “prestige” fragrance, as well as on youth-oriented cable channels like MTV, E! and VH1.
Extracts from an article by Sally Beatty
Source: Associated Press