Buddhist Marketer

Smells Like Marketing

From Faye Penn’s “making SCENTS” in the InStyle MAKEOVER 2009:

… parfumeurs often resort to elaborate back stories to sell their fragrances.  Consider the promotional text accompanying three fall launches.

There’s YSL’s woodsy, floral Parisienne, a new fragrance whose bottle has “vibrating facets evoking Paris, city of light, city of lust, the labyrinth of streets in which you can lose yourself.”

Then there’s Marc Jacobs’s spice-infused Lola, whose muse is “sexy, with a fun, flirtatious wink.  Coquettish and a bit provocative … Playfully alluring and irresistibly tempting.”

And what about My Glow, the baby-soft new whiff from Jennifer Lopez, for whom “now is the most perfect moment in her life.  Poised between pride in the past and promise for the future, she feels fulfilled as never before.  Her spirit is soothed with serenity, her heart overflowing with tenderness.  There is no deeper love, no greater happiness than this.  No words can describe it, but a fragrance can capture it.”

Of course, the author’s queries to an informally-assembled panel of ten men at a Manhattan bar during happy hour regarding how they’d describe each of the fragrances above resulted in zero consensus regarding what each of the scents conjured; Lola conjured thoughts ranging from “very conservative” to “cougar.”

The complexity of marketing a product like fragrance is a function of the complexity of consumer’s noses — the memories of our olfactory receptors are much more unique than visual memory, which does not experience much variation from Amurrican to Amurrican.  Our image-heavy media-drenched culture is relatively homogenous as far as eyeball stimulation goes, whereas I guarantee you that the scent of your mom’s home-cookin’ and the things you smelled breezing along the highway on a summer afternoon were markedly different from what my nose was exposed to.  (Rice; cow shit; mint farms.)

Which makes me wonder:  does this mean that finding a smart marketer is all the more important when the product you’re peddling is a fragrance? Or — given that the “story” is so profoundly arbitrary — can you simply select some random writer and call it a day?

My write-up of Viktor & Rolf’s Flowerbomb on Amazon has been found useful by 90% of the people who bothered to rate it:

I love Flowerbomb. Wearing it, I feel strong, powerful, sexy, and incredibly woman. It’s the scent version of gorgeous 4″ heels, great legs, and a “I know who I am, and I like it” swagger.

Yeah, okay, whatever that means.

Into Bits And Bytes I Am Torn

From “Write More Good” by Wayne Geyer in the June 2009 ish of HOW:

As communicators, our job is to feed our audience information in bite-sized pieces — and in a particular order.

But I attended a lecture by Stephen L. Carter during my reunion, whose thesis was

democracy needs dialogue more than it needs bumper stickers.

I agree with both.  Help?

A whisper-to-nonaction

I’m an Omni Select Guest member and received an email recently, subject line “Free Night at Omni for Amtrak Guest Rewards members”.  Unfortunately, upon reading the email, I couldn’t really figure out what I was supposed to do, exactly, in order to get said free night.

???

Can a girl get some clearly numbered boxes and arrow already?

I’ll do an A/B split against the team that created the email above vs. me at 7 a.m. before a Fika soymilk cappuccino any day of the week, yo.  Sheesh.

Call THAT to action, big guy.