The perfume market is an industry dominated by marketing rhetoric and non-standard sensory experiences, an industry driven by irrationality.

There is a saying in Suskind's novel "Perfume": Whoever masters the smell masters people's hearts.

This sentence has been regarded as a golden saying by various public accounts selling perfumes for a long time, and has led to various marketing techniques such as "scent that kills men", "can be attacked and received", and "scent that kills men".

But from a business perspective, this sentence should actually be said the other way around: whoever controls people's hearts can control their sense of smell.

If you study the perfume market, you will find that it is an industry dominated by marketing rhetoric and non-standard sensory experiences, an industry driven by irrationality.

In the previous issue of domestic luxury goods, I mentioned that some domestic perfume brands have embarked on the high-end route.

The larger background is that China's perfume market has grown against the trend under the influence of the epidemic in the past few years. According to the "2022 China Perfume Industry Research White Paper", from 2016 to 2021, the compound annual growth rate of China's perfume market was 21.4 %, approximately ten times the world market.

The industry is growing rapidly, and naturally a large number of players want to enter. In addition to the perfume business owned by big fashion brands in the past, as well as domestic perfume brands, many niche perfume brands have also entered China to make money in recent years.

With the advent of the post-epidemic era, it has almost become a consensus that the olfactory economy will maintain its high growth rate in recent years.

In this issue, I would like to talk about my understanding of the perfume industry from a marketing perspective and the possible development path of domestic perfumes in the future.

There are many brands mentioned in this issue, but none of them constitute purchase recommendations.

01

As we all know, beauty FMCG relies heavily on marketing.

There is a saying that in the beauty industry, we look at marketing in the short term, products in the medium term, and brands in the long term. Marketing can often determine whether a brand can survive to the "product-seeing" stage.

For leading companies like L'Oreal, whose brands are generally relatively competitive, marketing expenditures account for about 30% of revenue. Peers with weaker brand power need to pay more. For example, for some new consumer brands that use the entire company's efforts to support beauty bloggers, the marketing expense rate may reach 60%.

This shows how much this industry relies on advertising.

Perfume is similar, but the problem is that perfume is difficult to advertise.

Lipsticks and makeup can be used in fashion blockbusters, skin care products can also be used to show product texture and skin moisturization and whitening, and cleansing products can be directly discussed about their efficacy, and the products can be directly displayed.

But when it comes to marketing perfumes, apart from making the bottles look good, what else can you do? Even if the blogger boasts about it, you can't smell it through the screen, right?

Moreover, the carrier of fragrance is air. How to express the air in advertisements and also show that the air has a smell is a difficult problem.

I mentioned before when talking about the Internet celebrity economy that the media is an extension of people, but this extension is lame. All media can only convey audio-visual feelings.

The sense of smell that perfume serves can be said to be the most difficult sense to be mediated. If you don't go into the store and try the scent, you can't tell what scent you will like.

So perfume manufacturers can only find other ways to sell it.

According to the theory of olfactory psychologist Rachel Hertz, the brain's emotional processing, memory, motivation and olfactory cortex are located in the same location.

This means that although smell itself has no emotion, humans will instinctively associate smell with certain emotions, emotions, and memories.

And these emotions are highly bound to individual experience and private feelings.

Michael Bock, CEO of LVMH, the world's largest luxury goods group, once said: Perfume is the product of careful fantasy and packaging. It is full of personality, dreams, memories and emotions. Nothing has greater power than this.

In the field of commercial marketing, selling fragrance is difficult, but selling emotions is easier.

Therefore, we can think that perfume is not just a business about the nose, but a business about the imagination.

02

So, how does perfume sell imagination?

If we walk into a perfume counter to try out a scent, the clerk will often tell you a story, for example: This scent is aquatic, relatively fresh, and can be used by both men and women. It has a sea breeze smell, which is very suitable for summer.

This set of words is very important. Without the prompts of the store clerk, it is difficult for a person who does not know much about perfumes to associate the smell in his nose with terms such as sea breeze and summer, because that is the smell of watermelon ketone. .

Among them, "Shui Sheng Tiao" is the most critical word.

As we all know, perfumes come in various flavors. In terms of the roughest category, there are about a dozen types. For example, citrus, leather, woody, floral, fruity, etc., including the aquatic notes mentioned here. Each fragrance will include various subdivided fragrances. Such as the aroma of various flowers, fruits and spices, etc.

In addition, it is divided into top notes, middle notes and tail notes, which means that after the perfume is sprayed, different components evaporate at different speeds, so as time goes by, the perfume will evaporate different aromas.

Therefore, each perfume will have a fragrance chart to tell you what kind of smell the perfume will exude at different stages.

If you look at it mechanically and treat perfume as a book of exercises, then the fragrance table is the reference answers on the last few pages.

But what is confusing is that the fragrance list of perfume often does not come from the R&D department, nor does it correspond to the raw material formula one-to-one.

In fact, the scent of a perfume is often decided by the public relations department. The PR describes the scent based on how the perfume smells, and based on the market, determines how to package the scent to better attract consumers, and how to package the scent to better attract consumers. Only by combining words can we mobilize the imagination of consumers.

When it comes to selling perfume, imagination is very important.

Think about it, when a consumer goes to buy perfume, the scene is often a row of twenty or thirty perfumes. It’s okay for the customer to try this one, and it’s okay to try that one. They all smell good, but they can’t remember them after smelling them. , and in the end I didn’t know how to choose.

At this time, the naming of different perfumes will play a big role. It can be said that the naming of perfume can be called an art. As soon as you hear the name of most perfumes, you can generally tell what kind of fragrance it is.

For example, a cutting-edge brand called Sasina is positioned as a "sensual flirt", so its perfumes are named "You on the Pillow", "Muse under the Moon", and "Under the Shirt", highlighting a provocative character. Meaning, the rest is left to consumers to imagine.

Another niche perfume brand is called Stealing from the Moon. It is positioned as a romantic tragedy, so the product names are called "Flower of the Spine", "Love is the Ghost Hound", and "Anonymous Lover". Just seeing the name of the perfume will make you laugh. One imagines a romantic tragedy.

Another example is the names of some famous perfumes, which are even more impressive.

Like YSL's masterpiece Opium, just hearing the name has a mysterious, taboo and addictive tone. Another classic men's fragrance, Hermès' Earth, gives people a feeling full of male hormones and is also a famous scumbag fragrance.

There is also the Eau de Success, also known as the Eau Napoléon. It has such a domineering name, so you should know that it is… very expensive, right?

Generally speaking, when it comes to the art of naming perfumes, the most important thing is to leave people with a lot of room for imagination, to be vague enough, and to draw people into a scene in their minds instantly. Like another very popular perfume, Loewe's 001, another name is "Morning Afterwards", which focuses on "the time of dawn after lingering". It can also be regarded as a classic case of perfume marketing.

On the contrary, some affordable perfumes can have very straightforward names. For example, some brands focus on nostalgic concepts, such as "White Rabbit", "2B Pencil" and "Hot Soy Milk" from Smell Library, and "Mung Bean Paste" and "Old Popsicle" from Beast Youth. It is to use the taste of nostalgic food to arouse memories and sell emotions.

By the way, the Smell Library also has a nostalgic flavor called "Liang Baikai". Just, I don’t know what Liangbaikai tastes like, but it’s amazing anyway.

I remember a friend asked me, since they specialize in nostalgic flavors, why not make a toilet water flavor? I answered him, is there a possibility that the perfume with the scent of toilet water is called… toilet water?

In addition to the name, it is often paired with the packaging of the perfume. You will find that the design of the bottle of perfume is often the most thoughtful among cosmetics.

For example, a "wild" perfume is highlighted. Not only is its name "Dirty Words", but the bottle is also designed in a rough style and even looks a bit like a bottle of wine.

Contrary to the bad words, Bulgari Darjeeling Tea and Wind Love are both fresh and hanging styles, and the bottles use simple and transparent designs.

There is also Penhaligan's animal head series, which simply fictionalizes the story of a British aristocratic family, with each bottle representing a character. Many people buy it out of love for the bottle, or even a desire to collect it.

03

Why are perfume names and bottle designs so mysterious?

Ultimately, it’s because of the human olfactory mechanism at work. British psychology expert G. Neil Martin explained in his book "The Neuropsychology of Smell and Taste" that human olfactory information cannot be received and processed by the language center of the brain. Therefore, it is difficult to accurately name the smells I have smelled.

Therefore, it is difficult for us to describe smells with more precise words like "cube" and "color" like vision. We can only connect with the scene corresponding to the smell. So when describing smell, we can only say "the smell of rainy grass", "the smell of bakery", "the smell of hospital".

For consumers, although the motivation for buying perfume is "whether they like the smell of perfume", according to my observation, most people are actually not firm about fragrance. The name, bottle, copywriting and even the words of the salesperson play a key role in influencing consumer decision-making.

Perfume is one of the earliest categories born in the beauty industry, and its history is almost as long as the development of the industry. In fact, perfume was not used as a beauty tool at first, but as a medicine.

Because Europeans didn't take baths very often in the past, their bodies naturally smelled bad for a long time. In simple concepts, odor is usually associated with disease, so perfume is not only used to cover up body odor, but also to treat diseases.

Just like wearing sachets in ancient my country, they were mainly used to ward off evil spirits and epidemics.

In modern times, masking body odor is no longer the only need for perfume. Many people use perfume because they want to reflect their temperament through fragrance, or to put it bluntly, express what kind of person they are. This is why perfumes have evolved into various fragrance notes, divided into different types, and corresponding to different people, occasions, personalities, etc.

The most important thing in perfume marketing is to use these means to anchor your target customers.

If you have seen the promotion of some perfumes, especially men's fragrances, you will find that their methods are very similar. Usually, a female internet celebrity tells a story about an encounter. She accidentally smelled the scent of a boy and was very attracted to her. She instantly had the urge to fall in love with him, and then launched a perfume with this scent.

It's simple, but it's really effective.

In short, all style names and marketing methods are meant to give you a scene or picture.

Therefore, when a consumer buys perfume, he not only pays for the fragrance, but also pays for the scene he has imagined in his mind, and for himself in the scene.

Nowadays, many perfume brands on the market describe themselves as a "content company". The so-called content is to concretize the abstract taste of perfume.

But once it comes to expressions related to scenes and experiences, it becomes very subjective. This is why reviews about perfume are often mysterious and mysterious.

The same perfume can be evaluated as "like the first ray of sunshine hitting the face in the morning" or "smells like shower gel".

04

Therefore, the perfume business is an irrational and metaphysical business.

But it is precisely its irrationality and metaphysical color that gives a large number of domestic brands the opportunity to hit the high end. In the beauty industry, domestic products often start from the low-end market and rely on huge shipments to catch up commercially.

But in recent years, brands such as Guanxia, ​​Wenxian, and Yunyi that focus on Eastern culture and Chinese fragrances have not followed this old path. Instead, they have targeted the high-end market from price to positioning. The unit price per milliliter is more than 10 yuan, or even 20 yuan per milliliter.

Such a price even far exceeds the unit price of many international big-name perfumes.

Domestic perfumes can compete head-on with big international brands in the high-end market, precisely because the comparison of perfumes is not necessarily about who smells better, but who is better at telling stories and creating content, and who can guide consumers' imagination.

And just in the perfume category, international big brands don’t have much first-mover advantage.

Perfume is still an emerging category in China. Chinese consumers have not fully experienced the cycle from commercial fragrance to salon fragrance, and have not even had time to develop brand filters for foreign big names.

In other words, in the current perfume market, Chinese brands and foreign brands are on the same starting line.

As we said before, perfume is all about who can tell a story.

Two hundred years of industry accumulation and hundreds of the world's top perfumers are not as good as a brand manager who can write copywriting into the hearts of consumers.

The opportunity for domestic brands is here.

05

In the final analysis, any business related to human senses must follow the physiological characteristics of the senses.

Kant believed that among the five senses, only smell is subjective and animal. But this does not mean that the sense of smell is inferior to vision and hearing. On the contrary, precisely because of the subjectivity and irrationality of the sense of smell, it can bring a power that is completely different from the traditional business world.

When we succumb to audiovisual centrism, our thinking and behavior are often rational and predictable, and therefore easily controlled by the power of extreme rationality.

The recommendation algorithm studies how long we stay on each short video, the eye tracking test accurately determines which elements on the screen we respond to, and big data knows what genre, rhythm and melody we like best.

But the sense of smell is very interesting. It retains a lot of unknowability and animality. At least with current technology, it cannot be accurately measured and manipulated. Therefore, the olfactory market is different from the audiovisual market. You will find that no matter how hard big companies try, it will be difficult to completely control people's likes and dislikes of smells.

Therefore, this irrational market is particularly interesting and special at the moment.

Finally, I would like to end with a famous quote from Liu Cixin:

Lose humanity and lose a lot; lose animality and lose everything.

"As expensive as international brands, where does the confidence come from for domestic perfumes?" 》——Interface News