Fashion Special: Perfume Advertising

From big cats in collars and coyly flirtatious actresses to pert-buttocked male models and bored buffaloes – scent expert Lizzie Ostrom examines the weird and not always wonderful history of fragrance ads and asks, where can they go next?

Let’s start with the panthers. The leopards and the tigers. The whole panoply of big cats. They’re everywhere in perfume adverts: lounging on a chaise longue, wearing a diamanté collar; slinking around a mock-Versailles palace with a beautiful woman in a floor-length gown; making us ask, ‘Is this her pet, or is there some kind of weird relationship going on here?’

The thing is, panthers do make for a useful prop when the intangible, ineffable essence of scent must somehow be poured into something concrete, something visual. What better symbol of the danger and unhinged excitement of the latest big scent launch? Interestingly, perfume ad art direction in the 1920s, which also loved to feature big cats, was pretty much interchangeable with cigarette artwork. Both used symbolism, particularly of the ‘Orient’, to convey the drug-like intoxication offered by these products. 

Spotting the archetypal landscapes and characters populating global fragrance commercials resembles a game of Jungian bingo. Double-page spreads and epic screen ads are littered with chess sets (unlocks the strategist in you; a go-to in 1960s aftershave ads), sand dunes (escape from bourgeois conformism), grey-carpeted penthouses (you successful man, you) and photographic studios (because you’re the ingénue star of your own destiny). Of course, sex must be a part of it, given that perfume basically exists to help us get laid – perhaps overlooking the Eiffel Tower, on a beach with a rapidly turning tide, or in an industrial corridor, as if the protagonists are stuck in a mall loading bay and need some way of passing the time until they’re rescued.

It’s easy to see why the same props list turns up again and again. Perfume ads for the screen must strain to translate the emotional ‘weather’ that’s conjured by an intriguing scent into a narrative, and get stuck in a tired roster of scenarios. As Jade Tomlin, senior creative at digital agency Hugo & Cat points out: “Unlike all the other products you’d work on, even in beauty, there’s no product truth you can work with. It’s versions of a fantasy, of having a moment to escape your mind.”

But is it more a case of losing our minds? BMB’s Trevor Beattie says what we’re all thinking: “It’s an idea-less insanity. For fragrance brands nothing can be too camp, too ludicrous, too unfathomable or, of course, too expensive. They throw a leading Hollywood director and/or actor at the problem and paper over the distinct lack of idea with layers of cash. The irony being that they’ve all blurred into one big fat stinking un-fragrant daft brand, which has become the new low-light of Christmas.”

Should we be groaning, though, at a formula that seems to work? Peacocking, the very act of showing you can afford the best and therefore that your perfume is ‘caviar for the general’, has served Dior well in its campaign for new fragrance Sauvage, shot by Jean-Baptiste Mondino. Starring Johnny Depp and a nonchalant buffalo, it’s racked up over 20m YouTube views at the time of writing and topped the Viral Video Charts this September (it’s early, though, to gauge sales effectiveness).

The millennial J’Adore by Christian Dior remains the number two bestseller in France, sold by Charlize Theron giving iterative service to the act of wearing a gold dress. And Cool Water by Davidoff, 27 years old and still wildly popular, is spurred on by a recurring dive into the ocean by the latest choice of action hero. The oiled pecs and butterfly stroke are a constant; subtle tonal changes update the story for the times. 2015’s campaign, starring Scott Eastwood contemplating the elements, portrays a more introspective, thoughtful masculinity compared with 1992’s poseur Brian Buzzini doing push-ups on the beach, toned buttocks on show.

Will Andrews, of Proctor & Gamble’s prestige fragrance design team (behind the Hugo Boss brand) thinks the palette of options will always be limited. “If we smell a new fragrance blind, it’s largely meaningless – beyond a like or dislike. It’s utterly abstract for many people. So we’ve got to seize meaning through metaphor. And that means attaching celebrity.” Andrews admits being absolutely riveted by the Depp campaign: “I was in London Waterloo station, and it was playing repeatedly on a big screen and I was stood there watching it ten times. This is the thing. They just have to grab your attention, to get you intrigued enough to try it.”

Using celebrity to sell fragrance isn’t a recent phenomenon. Early 20th-century ads generally festishised the packaging, with close-ups of bottles and boxes, but they knew how to rope in the fashion icons of the time, too. In 1910 Bourjois brought out a scent dedicated to the French opera singer Marguerite Carré. A year later, British firm Atkinsons signed up London’s variety entertainment dancers, the Gaiety Girls, to flog their latest release, Poinsettia, with the cheery claim: “I am surprised that a perfume of such rare charm and delicacy can be obtained at such a price.” There’s a line today’s fragrance ambassadors could try at their next press junket.

There are some examples where the dreamland of fantasy is replaced by something more prosaic, or even parodic, and this can work brilliantly. Following in the footsteps of Hai Karate’s groundbreaking marketing ploy of issuing men with self-defence manuals to fight off horny females, BBH’s work for Lynx/Axe has for years deployed the cologne-as-confidence-trick motif with tongue-in-cheek and an eye for toying with cultural memes. Take their 1996 screen ad featuring a geeky lad’s wild night with a beautiful woman, which comes to a brutal end when he wakes up from his dream and realises he’s stuck with his girlfriend: Jennifer Aniston.

But as a personal care product, rather than a fine fragrance, Axe has room to play. Humour is difficult when collaborating with a fashion brand purveying luxury goods that’s tightly in control of its own image. Even mass market scents don’t often work well with it. Take, for example, Enjoli, which in the 1970s attempted to align itself with the feminist cause: “The eight-hour perfume for the 24-hour woman.” Promoted with a doctored version of the Peggy Lee song I’m a Woman, in which the singer takes us through her various guises, from busy worker to caring mum to man-pleaser, Enjoli threatened to demolish the glamour of the fragrance world in one swoop by actually featuring someone wielding a frying pan on camera. Where can you go from there?

The story is changing, though… slowly. One platform shift, shared by the fashion industry, is represented by the (sometimes reticent) invitation for the viewer to be a part of the story, rather than just a voyeur in the world of supermodels and big cats. Last year Burberry extended their core Kate Moss- and Cara Delevingne-fronted My Burberry campaign and teamed up with agency Storm Digital to offer an invitation via TV-on-demand ads for punters to monogram their own bottle using a smartphone and see their flacon on a Piccadilly Circus billboard. This autumn Armani is promoting Sì by asking women who want to ‘Say yes to life’ to curate their own shareable film package from a reel of vignettes, each featuring someone embarking on an unusual or inspiring activity. 

The industry needs to find something new. In traditional markets consumption is on the wane. China is a growing market, one where fragrance enjoys positioning as a symbol of luxury, but where there is little tradition of fragrance use which, as P&G’s Andrews acknowledges, presents a problem, not least because, “We have to find the cultural fit that’s relevant to the audience. How do you promote a product that is about standing out and being personally identified by your fragrance, in a country with a recent history of prioritising collective identity over all else?” Brazil, whose love of premium fragrance is cheering the industry, currently favours traditional, simpler compositions, not creatively challenging concepts. Market buoyancy has come from the Middle East, which has a long tradition of perfume-wearing and a thriving luxury offer (think $25,000 editions); below-the-line is the strategy here, predicated on in-store personal discovery experiences and private parties that turn shopping for scent into a ritual.

Meanwhile, in Europe and America it’s another story. As with many other consumer products – most notably beer – perfume has been going niche in the past 15 years. For a while this was a trend restricted to those who considered themselves to be connoisseurs – fume-heads and scent freaks – but it’s moving mainstream. Last year Estée Lauder purchased both Editions de Parfums Frédéric Malle and cult US favourite, Le Labo. But as soon as the global fashion brands gobble them up, a new army of small, splintered, artisanal names pop up like mushrooms after a damp night.

Niche fragrance may be small when it comes to campaign budgets, but what it can afford to do is to break away from the archetypal narratives, and explore a different kind of storytelling. These days there are scent brands inspired by the highly-personal unfolding of a real-life love affair (Jul et Mad); by photographic images – perfumers are given a photograph as inspiration to recreate in fragrance (Olfactive Studio); and by specific moments in history (Carlos Huber’s Arquiste range).

While fashion-led fragrances conjure a world that they hope leads you to pick up the scent, the upstarts are using the scent itself as a portal to transport you to another world. For example, Penhaligon’s (recently bought by Puig, who also produce Paco Rabanne perfumes) collaborated with Cereal magazine to produce a film conjuring the sensation of smelling their new duo: Blasted Heath and Blasted Bloom. With no people in-shot, the film features tactile footage of cold, wild landscapes accompanied by diegetic sound, like an incredibly English version of the Cool Water world. According to Matt Huband, associate director of global marketing for Penhaligon’s: “The first person view means the viewer feels the elements directly without the interference of a narrative. It’s direct, personal and open to interpretation – like a perfume.” The films aren’t just for social media sharing. Principally, they’re played in the brand’s 22 stores around the world to heighten the in-store scent-sniffing experience.

Can larger brands now start to offer the same intimate relation with fragrance – multi-modal experiences where your own perceptions take centre stage? Andrews thinks the possibilities all come down to the size and type of space in which the fragrances are marketed: “Those types of fragrance houses have their own stores – they control the space, and so can produce original and exciting live content. The task for brands in shared retail with limited options for engagement is how to do that – to stretch out into this real estate.”

Jonathan Bottomley, chief strategy officer at BBH, runs the Axe account and is pretty au fait with fragrance. He believes that what niche offers is “more than storytelling; it’s access to the creative process”. Following the cue of the cocktail movement, the mystique of fragrance is giving way in certain audiences to greater consumer inquisitiveness. How is the stuff actually made? What am I smelling here? How can I alter the juice? This has found expression in American brand Juniper Ridge’s touring perfume-making truck which sets up shop in mountain ranges to distil wild materials, or Ex Nihilo’s precision-dosing, polished-brass Osmologue machines, which mix customers’ personalised fragrances (something that recalls 1930s couture house Jean Patou’s perfume-cocktail bar experience).

Bottomley thinks the golden egg of the new age of fragrance marketing will be “the Nike ID of fragrance. The emerging generation has grown up in a world of authentic products where they’ve been invited to meet the maker. Scent is a form of self-expression and so we have to start with how the product can offer that personalisation.”