Forums That Perfume Brands Should be Monitoring
The internet has allowed all of your ideal customers (people who spend the most money on perfumes) to congregate in specific online communities where they talk about perfume. Many people on these forums are sophisticated buyers, meaning they do their research before buying a fragrance. They look at reviews and they ask for opinions on scents from other like-minded connoisseurs. They pay attention to fragrance houses and the perfumers making the scents.
This is in stark contrast to the average perfume consumer who walks into a department store and buys whatever perfume they think smells nice at the time. The chances are this is a designer perfume brand that they are already familiar with. If you are a small niche perfume brand, your advantage lies in appealing to sophisticated buyers.
Why?
Sophisticated buyers are already looking for artisanal niche scents that are more unique and stand out from popularized ‘department store scents’
As a small perfume brand, you likely don’t have distribution in large department stores, so your focus should be on creating better advertising for seasoned perfume enthusiasts who go to greater lengths to find specific perfumes
For these reasons, why would you NOT be getting direct feedback from your ideal customer profile who spend time in various online perfume forums.
Let’s Look at Some Online Forums That Focus on Perfume
Fragrantica
Fragrantica was started in 2006 in the US as a perfume review website that has grown to be the biggest online fragrance review website and forum in the world with millions of forum posts and over 33 million website visitors every month. If you run a perfume brand, there is a very high likelihood that your perfumes have been reviewed and talked about on this forum.
Parfumo is a German based website that has an active online forum of people around the world, with roughly 3 million monthly website visitors. Parfumo serves as the most extensive perfume directory with reviews of almost every single perfume released in the modern era, as well as detailed categorical information for all the perfumes listed.
Basenotes was created in 2000 to be a resource for perfumist and a repository for perfume information. The website has grown to a substantial size with a strong emphasis on the art of perfumery and breakdowns of fragrance notes / accords.
Reddit is a collection of forums or ‘subreddits’ that focus on specific topics. It features numerous subreddits dedicated to fragrance including:
r/Fragrance - this subreddit has 1.7 million subscribers
r/Perfumes - this subreddit has 139,000 subscribers
r/Colognes - this subreddit has over 107,000 subscribers
How to Monitor These Forums
Staying up to date on trends in the perfume industry by paying attention to what people are saying online is a key tactical advantage. Monitoring these forums for any mentions of your brand is especially important for smaller perfume brands that have a harder time getting feedback on their scents due to a lack of online visibility.
The obvious first place to get feedback on your scents is on these site’s perfume review sections. If their directory has included your perfume, there are likely accompanying reviews. The ‘forum’ section of these websites is where real conversations are happening about perfume.
Unfortunately, the internal search function for these forums can be very subpar in returning meaningful search results for conversations specifically about your perfume. What I recommend instead, is to use advanced Google search parameters. This simply means, refining your search to only find results for your keyword within a website.
For example:
If you wanted to find discussions on the perfume La fille de Berlin by Surge Lutens specifically on the forum Fragrantica, then you would enter this prompt:
The formula is to enter site:
Then include the website you want to search within. Do not include any spaces between the colon and the website.
After the website, include the keyword (in our case La fille de Berlin) that you would like to find within Fragrantica.
The search results will only consist of Fragrantica articles and forum posts.
What You Should Not Do
These forums are a rare place on the internet where people can connect without getting inundated by ads. So don’t advertise here. If you advertise here, it will be detected and your account will be banned, as these forums all have strict ‘No Advertising’ policies. The users on these sites are also very adept at sniffing out astroturfers (people who pretend to leave unsolicited comments which are really just thinly disguised marketing and PR campaigns).
Also, manually astroturfing these forums will not provide your perfume brand with any kind of meaningful advertising scale. Any time spent advertising your perfume brand would better be spent elsewhere. As mentioned above, these forums serve as a way to get feedback, as well as a place to genuinely contribute to fragrance discussions. Any other purpose for these forums runs contrary to their intended purpose.
How You Should Interpret the Feedback You See on These Forums
These forums, while very large in size, only represent a fraction of the overall fragrance market. Most people aren’t an active user on Fragrantica, posting about their favorite gourmand fragrances. Also, as mentioned above, many of the more tenured fragrance enthusiasts show a preference for niche fragrance houses, and many users show an active hostility towards designer brands and anything mass-market. These biases need to be accounted for.
Seeing what these users are saying about your perfume can be very helpful but I would never recommend changing your perfume development process or artistic direction. In fact, 99.9% of discussions should not have any effect on the direction that you steer your perfume brand because the sample size is so small. In addition, you will never find consensus. What a few users say about a specific perfume in your collection holds very little weight. While 3 or 4 users might say the opening notes on your perfume are too “insert adjective here”, there might be 30 users in that discussion/post that disagree, but do not post anything in disagreement.
The whole purpose of monitoring these forums is to find data points that you might not normally account for. Maybe your brand hasn’t standardized all of its ingredient sources and when you used an ingredient from Source A in one batch, and used the same ingredient from Source B in another batch, and you see discussions on the forums about noticing your scent change from one batch to the next, you can infer that these ingredient sourcing changes are not going unnoticed and you can adjust accordingly.
Finding meaningful data points on the forums isn’t always easy, but the good news is that this exercise takes very little time. Every great consumer brand is constantly seeking product feedback. If a brand isn’t getting product feedback then it NEEDS to be. Perfume brands are no exception to this, and should be open to sourcing product feedback from outside of just focus groups, and looking for honest feedback whenever it might exist. Perfume advertising campaigns and brand messaging should be an ongoing process, forums provide a helpful tool for feedback and possible refinement.
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