How Perfume Brands Should Approach Brand Safety

Brand safety is a vague term so let’s first define it. It means that any new content, product release, brand messaging, publication release, or public statement should fit within the existing brand guidelines of the brand. Every piece of content should fit together cohesively. Nothing should look out of place.

Colors, typefaces, messaging, customer avatars, lettermarks, etc should all look like they are from the same company. You can think of it as a collage. Every image in the collage might look different, but the overall aesthetic should match the other images in the collage. Applying this to messaging gets a little bit more tricky. You need to define a brand voice and stick with it. What is the tone of all of your messaging? What types of words are used? What is the sentence structure?

Newer brands that don’t have well-defined brands will often look glued together because they don’t have well established brand safety in place. Another common reason brands don’t look unified is that they don’t have the money and resources to create custom content so they use whatever pre-existing content is available to them. Often this will mean using images and other content that looks great but does not fit within their existing brand. It stands out in the wrong way.

A big part of brand safety that even big brands get wrong is staying aligned with the brand’s core values while being mindful of the cultural climate. One of the most famous examples of a brand way overstepping its brand guidelines was the Pepsi commercial featuring Kendall Jenner. Pepsi was unable to read the room and they put out a commercial that didn’t say anything or stand for anything while managing to agitate everyone. They weren’t able to read the cultural climate of the time.

The takeaway: if you are going to put out a commercial that is risky due to its social commentary nature, then the commercial better be aligned with your brand values and also fit within the cultural climate without being vacuous.

pepsi commercial

Why Perfume Brand Safety is More Important Than Most Other Products

Here is something a lot of marketers won’t like me saying, but it’s true, brand safety and the fear of defining a customer avatar is holding a lot of small brands back. If your brand is under $5 million in revenue, brand safety should not be at the forefront of your mind when marketing.

However…

the perfume industry is different. Here is why. It is one of the few product categories that is:

  1. Very subjective - everyone likes different scents

  2. The product has very little objective quantifiers

This combination of product attributes is not found anywhere else. Lets zoom in on point 2. The actual contents of the perfume aren’t what gets marketed. Consumers aren’t scrutinizing the ingredients like they are with food products or other cosmetic products. Consumers don’t know the quality of Oud or Patchouli being sourced. Most perfumes don’t even use any essential oils. Consumers have no idea. Yes, the taste of food is also subjective, but the freshness of ingredients are not. Visually, a consumer can discern good looking pizza from bad looking pizza without having to taste it. How can someone discern which transparent or beige liquid is Blue de Chanel vs Axe body spray? With cosmetics, people are especially careful to review the ingredients considering the consumer is putting the product directly on the skin or hair daily, and in large quantities.

Perfume packaging no longer provides a clue as to how refined the composition of the perfume is. I have seen plenty of clone perfumes and cheap knockoffs with great packaging. I have also seen top-tier perfumes with ordinary packaging and stock bottles. The perfume bottle and packaging are important, but it isn’t why the consumer is buying that perfume.

The only objective measurement of perfume that has emerged recently is the performance of the perfume. How long does the perfume scent last? Everything else about perfume is completely subjective and hard to measure or quantify.

This is why the strength of the brand matters so much in the perfume industry.

The weight of the perfume brand is what does much of the heavy lifting to get the sale. People often buy based on brand in the fragrance category because there just are not a lot of other objective data points for people to review. This is especially true with online purchases where the person may have only read or seen a review of the perfume but have not sampled the perfume. While this type of buyer is not as common as the department store buyer, they do exist.

How Brands Should Think About Brand Safety

I mentioned the unpopular opinion earlier that most non-fragrance brands shouldn’t worry much about brand safety until they find product market fit. While this isn’t true for perfume brands, I will add another opinion that might be unpopular, unless you are a brand that has been around for a while with a well-established brand identity, you need to be standing out. This means taking chances sometimes. When you go out on a limb with a post, ideally it will fall within your brand guidelines, but sometimes it might fall just outside those guidelines.

There is a huge opportunity here. A perfect example is the fast food chain Wendys, and their X/Twitter persona.

wendy's twitter
wendy's funny twitter

This is a fast food chain in the United States that has a feisty online persona on X. Does this fall in line with Wendy’s brand guideline when they originally jumped on X? Probably not, but it works. Why? It reads the room and the cultural climate. It knows a lot of people are tired of ‘corporate speak’. It also understand that the best platform to do this is X, because it’s a ‘don’t hold your punches’ platform with a lot of hot takes.

It is hard to accurately correlate how much this new provokator social media strategy impacted the company's bottom line, but they did increase sales and social media engagement A LOT that year. This breakdown reviews some of the financial data from Wendys during this time which all trends in the positive direction.

Keep in mind, Wendy’s is a public company doing $1.9 billion in revenue per year. If they can go out on a limb, it’s fair to say that most other businesses can too.

Applying This to Perfume Brands

Obviously, we are not saying you should go on X or Instagram and start taking hotshots at people and other companies. What we are saying is, a huge buying trigger for consumers looking to buy a perfume is to stand out. And a brand that stands out will be better positioned to acquire these customers.

We advocate that brands stand out through their creative direction, specifically in photo composition and unique video content. Instead of having to step out of your brand guidelines to inject some interesting art direction into your imagery, the better approach is to have a brand with an established brand identity of posting novel photos with stand-out art direction. We prefer to work with brands who already have this feature in their brand identity. If you are a fairly new brand, it is easier to alter the direction of your brand identity in small steps. If you are a long established brand with a well defined brand identity then the priority for any new content or messaging is to stand out within the confines of the existing brand identity.

The problem we see with a lot of perfume brands is that they run the exact same perfume branding playbook. The vignettes with floral arrangements. The predictable flat-lay photos with no distinguishable objects or arrangements. The man or woman on the beach. Compositions that have no energy and convey zero emotion.

Some of these types of photos have their place in a marketing playbook when used sparingly, but overall, it just isn’t that interesting. People have already seen that photo before. It’s already been done. And worse, many of these photos and videos don’t tell a story. What is even worse is when you go to a perfume brand’s Instagram page and 100% of their photos are just vignettes and close-ups of the perfume bottle. It’s formulaic and boring.

Perfume brands need to have something distinctive that makes their brand identity unique. If you are a perfume brand, do yourself a favor and get our guide on how to run effective brand marketing.

Conclusion

Perfume advertising is broad. Branding is vague. Define what this looks like for your brand by creating a refining a definitive set of brand guidelines. Once you have the parameters set for the brand’s messaging tone, creative direction, etc. you can start focusing on creating the content. If you feel creatively boxed in by rigid brand guidelines then you likely overstepped somewhere in their creation. Perfume brands NEED to stand out visually and it is entirely possible to do that while authentically conveying your brand.

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