Yves de Chiris on marketing and Angel ~ Deleted Scenes from the Perfect Scent
by Chandler Burr, 21 January 2008
Like the previous sections, this extract is not edited but nearer an initial draft - as such you may find notes from the author about descrptions to insert later.
Details of how you can obtain the book, as well as the chance to discuss this extract can be found at the end.
This is an analysis by Yves de Chiris, one of the perfume industry’s most experienced executives and consultants, of the marketing of perfumes. I got it via a long telephone conversation with Yves where he spoke and I got it into the computer as fast as my fingers would move. I think it’s extremely interesting, but my editor and I finally decided we couldn’t figure out how to change it from a simple direct word-for-word repetition of what Yves was saying. I wound up using this information in a somewhat different, more organic form elsewhere in the book.
The perfume industry guru Yves de Chiris (he of the family rooted five centuries in Grasse perfumery; his direct ancestor was a character in Susskind's novel Perfume) had some advice on the dismal juices many of the licensors were pumping out, which basically was "make better juice," and he offered essentially three strategies application to the Hermès situation. The first was: unify. What (for example) was the secret of Chanel’s phenomenal success. "Lorie De Palma, Chanel's senior VP of marketing, was at a course I was giving," said de Chiris, "and I was asked about Chanel No 5’s success— top five everywhere in the world— and I said 'la clarté de l’image,' the clarity of image. A woman wearing Chanel is recognizable at a hundred meters as A Woman Wearing Chanel, this identifiable Thing. And Lagerfeld has made Chanel’s fashion evolve without losing the Chanel signature. Coco’s fashions were masculine hairstyles, stark black-and-whites, and the square bottle is, of course, a masculine bottle, though," he added, "one doesn’t say it. Strong. Clarté de l’image. Packaging. Signature. Right up to Chance, every new Chanel bottle was square, which meant every bottle consolidated Chanel No 5 by reinforcing that square, rather than cannibalizing it. They're simply so strong it's breathtaking. When they advertise Coco Mademoiselle, they’re in effect advertising Chanel No 5 because the packaging is the same. Chanel No 5 is simply indomitable.
One of the widespread credos is that the top five—Chanel 5 being the always-cited example—are maintained artificially with huge advertising expenditures. "Chanel 5 ne recrute pas," one of the world's most wildly successful perfumers said to me recently, adding, as everyone does, that 5 is, always, everywhere, a hands-down disaster in blind tests, a perfume people hate—until they are told "This is Chanel 5," at which point they love it, a phenomenon universally ascribed to Chanel's immaculate image. Others, including de Chiris, disagree— " I don’t agree that its success is due to advertising. They spend less on marketing 5 than Estée Lauder does on Beyond Paradise." In any case the thesis, like most things in the perfume world, is unconfirmable. NPD is locked tight except to the industrial groups capable of paying huge sums for the information, and even then the data was, purposely, incomplete.
The second was: ramp up. Chanel had some of the most expensive products in the world, and the problem (in de Chiris' view)—the inconsistency, the illogic—is that you could buy Chanel fragrances at the same price as anyone else’s. Hermès products were, if anything, even more incredibly expensive and hard to get— the price of an Hermès tie, a belt—fine, but this simply meant that Hermès' fragrances were that much more incoherent. Hermès perfumes were no more expensive than any other fragrances on the market. They should be. "They should offer perfumes that are beautiful works of art and twice as expensive as everyone else’s. A cut above." Of course that would mean less volume. On the other hand, it could mean more profit. Even if you didn't make money initially. He sighed. It was a matter of establishing a name and an image as having the most unique and expensive fragrances in the world. He leaned back, noted equably, And once you’ve done that, then you milk. Guerlain could have been that. It was in the perfect position, the perfect brand to occupy the most luxurious price point stratosphere, but LVMH made the gross and insane error of deciding to cash out (under this guidance Guerlain would in 2006 produce Insolence, a meretricious commercial scent worthy of a drugstore aisle). Guerlain should be doing the Joys, with the same price points, but people paid for a Guerlain perfume what they paid for a (wait for it) Calvin Klein.
Which led to the third: Bet on the niche and walk away from the lists. "The problem today is that everyone wants to be in the top 10 on the list, which is ridiculous: those are mass market fragrances, all of them, and rely for profit on volume. I’d rather market my fragrances to the passionate elite. I'd make more money in the end, and I'd get to make better perfumes because that's what those clients who are serious about perfume really want. Go narrow and deep rather than shallow and wide. Before they launch another fragrance I’d decide whether I’m going to go for niche, for high price, and if I were Hermès, I certainly would."
What was narrow and deep? De Chiris offered the paradigmatic example, the megahit that was Thierry Mugler's inimitable and controversial Angel; de Chiris himself had, along with Mugler and Mugler's impresario Vera Strubi, creative directed perfumer Olivier Cresp in building of Angel. When it was launched in 1992, Angel was so unusual it had great difficulty getting off the ground. "I have huge admiration for Mugler," one woman industry exec told me. "Une grande imagination et des couilles inimaginables." (A huge imagination and huge balls.) It is almost impossible to recall the artistic and financial risk that was Angel. "Angel," observed de Chiris, "is a love/hate fragrance. ________TK INSERT YVES' DESCRIPTION OF ITS COMPOSITION. "If you had done a massive launch with Angel, you’d probably have fallen flat on your face, because it’s a fragrance that has to be explained at point of sale. When we were launching it we thought up a trick for the sellers and told them to do it: You take the consumer’s hand, you spray it on, and you say 'Beware, this is a unique fragrance.' And then you let go of her hand. This is all the difference between 'Agh!' and 'Wow!…' because she’s been forewarned. Anything a consumer cannot reference is worrying and creates a subconscious phenomenon of rejection. And anything that is unique and original is axiomatically not referencable. So you get a shying away from the product with anything original, and you can only handle this at point of sale. What Angel had was uniqueness, which means it had character. And it was quite powerful. The women who bought it were buying something, which was being able to walk into a room and have heads turn and people say 'What are you wearing?…'
"The other reason Angel became such a phenomenon was the strategy, which was to position Angel as limited distribution but as the number one sale at the points of sale in which we'd placed it. It could be done again, the house that attempts it would simply have to respect a certain discipline. But that's the problem; today people measure success by sales volume, and the Thierry Mugler route is not that. If you broaden your distribution too quickly, every shop assistant and secretary will buy it, and it will become vulgar. So you do selective distribution, and you broaden that distribution very slowly. That means a tremendous amount of discipline. Classic Lancôme/L’Oréal distribution would be 2500 points of sale. A classic Chanel distribution would be 1500 POS. Classic Cartier distrubtion would be 950. When Mugler launched Angel in France, they went into 350. They then gradually broadened distribution, and now they’re at about the same distribution as Chanel. When Clarins saw the success of Angel in the specific sales points where they were—" (Clarins owns the license of Thierry Mugler perfumes) "—which was basically Number one everywhere, they immediately said 'Let’s broaden it,' and Vera had the courage to resist strongly. I’ve had people come to me and say We want to do another phenomenon like Angel, and I say 'Fine, but you have to respect a certain discipline,' and they say yes, but then when it comes to doing it they don’t really want to.
"Market research repeatedly names Angel as one of the most divisive scents. Most executives would have killed the project based on that. Vera, astutely, backed it for exactly that reason. Why? Because only 3% of the market liked Angel. But of the clients in that 3%, 90% of them absolutely loved it. And they came back to it over and over again. Which meant that Mugler owned almost 3% of a multi-billion dollar market. And that gives you a market leader—Angel topped the lists and is still on them to this day—and amazing staying power. I'll always prefer a juice with a deeply dedicated fanatic following that lasts over time to a perfume generating a broad shallow phenomenon that evaporates before the next shallow launch."
Q&A with Chandler Burr
Could Angel make it big if it was launched with the industry as it is today?
It’s strange, this is absolutely one of the questions that everyone in
the industry asks each other, and the answer everyone gives is: no.
They say “no” because of the insane excess of launches, the speed at which anything that doesn’t rush to the top of the lists is unceremoniously dumped, the volume of stuff backing up the pipelines, the total lack of sentimentality and emotion invested in the perfumes these days (except by the perfumers, who secretly love their children and whose hearts break when they fail). But my response to those who say “no” is: “Light Blue.”
- Discuss this extract at the Basenotes Community
- 'The Perfect Scent: Inside the Perfume Industry in Paris and New York' will be available from 22 January 2008. Published by Henry Holt. Click here to pre-order from Amazon.com
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