Do Fragrances Require Transparency or Mystique?

With purchasing habits changing, how should brands respond?

By Richard Cope, director of foresight, Mintel

Fragrance is a category in which usage habits are changing, according to Mintel’s research for its Beauty Buying and the Recession Report. Women are embracing “Austerity Chic” and being more frugal with their beauty. They are reluctant to actually trade down on quality, but they are buying fewer scents and using them more sparingly.

So how should brands respond? One answer is to offer practicality, as Estée Lauder is doing. Lauder is placing an emphasis upon value—with smaller, less-expensive perfume bottles sizes—and transparency, with brands such as Clinique having their prices posted at the counter.

As fragrance becomes more precious, the alternative is to take the Coco Chanel route and seek to reassert its importance and exclusivity. For example, the Chanel No. 5 campaign (a cinematic, romantic rail journey starring Audrey Tautou of “Amelie”) offers heritage and gives its brand a luxurious timeless quality. Here’s how it plays out alongside another iconic brand’s fragrance campaign.

Audrey’s Turkish Delight

Chanel No. 5 and Dior have embarked upon a blockbuster battle of“event advertising,” with France’s two top actresses going head to head in a case of fragrance “Star Wars.”

Chanel’s campaign is a crossover between movies and branding. Audrey Tautou plays the starring role in Coco Avant Chanel and also in a cinematic extended advert for its No. 5 brand. “Train to Turkey” reunites Audrey Tautou with her “Amelie” director Jean Pierre Jeunet.

Until the appearance of a digital camera at the close, this advertisement seems dislocated in time. Its location, however, is definite and notable for its focus on old world European charm and Eastern promise, as opposed to the modern Antipodean antics of Baz Luhrmann and Nicole Kidman.

This new campaign emphasizes and maintains Chanel’s air of luxury, sophistication and elegance. This campaign marks an unwillingness to compromise on quality—recession or no recession—and successfully ties fragrance to recession-proof cinematic escapism.

Hitchcockian Dior

Dior’s contribution to cinema also reunites a successful French partnership—actress Marianne Couthillard and director Olivier Dahan of “La Vie en Rose” fame. Their Lady Noir Affair campaign is especially ambitious, being an hour-long mini-series, broken up into episodes.

The episodes draw distinctly on Alfred Hitchcock, right down to the “Vertigo”-inspired styling of the credits and music score. The content may differ wildly from Chanel’s campaign, but shares its European locations and timeless glamour. Likewise, the brand is lent the aspiration and mystique of something worth having.

NOTE: Watch for Beauty Packaging’s special feature on what’s currently driving fragrance purchases…coming in the September issue—in print and online.