Creating the Signature Scent

Creating a “signature” scent for a brand’s scent marketing purposes is not much different from translating the persona of a celebrity or the ideas of a designer into a fragrance. In the “fine fragrance” (the perfumes and eau de toilettes) category alone, 1,000+ new scents are launched worldwide every year. It requires a lot of creativity and even more marketing dollars to bring - and keep - them on the consumer’s radar screen. Often times, fragrance launches are a very public affair, comparable to the premiere of a future blockbuster movie. And, like the movies, they often fizzle and disappear as quickly as they came…

As a brand owner taking the leap of faith into scent marketing, you want to do it right. So you hire a scent marketing consultant and she will help you develop a “fragrance brief”. It describes in detail what you want your brand to smell like and draws from inspirations such as brand image, corporate identity, core values, in-store design, color schemes, customer demographics and preferences, sometimes even the owners’ personal taste.

If you were in the fine fragrance business (like Estee Lauder or COTY) your consultant would take the brief to a number of fragrance manufacturers, most of which you probably never heard of; Givaudan, IFF, Firmenich, Symrise, Taksasgo to name the five largest. With an extensive staff of in-house perfumers they translate your “fragrance brief” into a scent and present you with the results. You narrow them down, maybe run some market research, make some modifications, shoot a beautiful ad campaign and you’re off to the store shelves. The “creative”, the perfumer’s work, by the way, you would get for free. It’s a well-oiled machine, which in the end produces large amounts of “juice”, fragrances often described as “emotions in a bottle”. And those manufacturers who didn’t win the brief will try again (and win) next time.

But since you are an airline, a consumer electronics brand or a car manufacturer, those traditional rules and processes do not apply.

Your scent marketing consultant better be well connected to a world-class perfumer who can think “outside the bottle” and deliver the appropriate translation of your brand into a signature scent. Once this scent is formulated – increasingly this involves throwing in a couple of flavor components - you need to find a manufacturer to produce the fairly small quantities (usually around 500 kilo a batch) that an IFF wouldn’t make for you. By the way, the “creative” for a signature scent can run between $25K and $100K, the fragrance oil anywhere between $35 and $75 per kilo. So, unless being associated with your brand has a major PR value for the fragrance manufacturer, be prepared to pay for the creative upfront and to guarantee the minimum quantities they demand.

Another option is a “library scent”, often the result of various trial-and-error or rejection processes every perfumer and manufacturer goes through over the years. It wouldn’t be designed especially for you but it would save you the creative cost and you would only have to pay for the bulk. However, finding the fragrance that matches your initial brief from tens of thousands of library scents out there is looking for the proverbial needle in the haystack. Get ready to face lots of small bottles and have your consultant pre-select them or at least categorize them. There’s only so much a nose can handle…

As so often, there’s a major “buyer beware”: Don’t try this on the cheap! Whenever a substance is released into the open there are health and safety concerns – apart from some people’s assumption that a scent can make you do anything, including buying stuff you don’t need. Which, by the way, is not true. But please get your fragrance from a manufacturer that will abide to current industry regulations, that belongs to IFRA and RIFM which are the self-regulatory bodies of the fragrance industry that conduct product testing and evaluation, and that can provide you with the necessary paperwork. A product from a back lot in China will do your brand, your customers and your staff more harm than good.

In my next installment on scent marketing I will explain the various ways to release a scent at the point of sale and in applications you may not even have thought of.

Contributed by Harald Vogt for Branding Strategy Insider   

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

Comments

[Air Sense]

Hey, it's great to see you guys talking about incorporating scent into branding strategy. I've linked your blog on Air Sense News, a blog for scent marketers, as well as scent scientists and anyone interested in ambient scenting and its wide variety of applications.

[Jon Wetzel]

At the end of the your article about "Creating the Signature Scent" you talk about how to release a scent at the point of sale and in applications that haven't even been thought of.

Are you familar with our product at www.scentedpens.com. We don't use scented ink but incorpate a companies signature fragrance into the grip of the pen.

[Ruchi]

Hey! Thanks for the article. But I want to know how much it cost to develop a signature scent for scented trims or packaging? Can you share information on that?

[Harald H. Vogt]

Ruchi,

It may cost anywhere between $25K and $125K depending on which manufacturer you go with. The reason is that it takes not only a perfumer (the creative genius) but also an evaluator (the link between the perfumer and the client) and an account executive to work on your project. Anything less than that may be somebody pulling some options from a "scent library" (the creative work has already been done) and putting them in front of you.
Let me know if you need more.
Harald H. Vogt

[alison]

Hello,
At one point you say that the 'creative' perfumer's work is free and at another you say they cost between 25K and 100K. Does the perfumers work get billed once their creation gets selected? Is it built into the cost of the 'juice'? Thanks.