Sniffing out new markets
Jinfo Blog

By Joanna Ptolomey

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Whilst waiting for my flight to board at Heathrow airport recently, I decided to splurge on some perfume. The sales person was very keen to talk about FiFi awards – fragrance of the year awards sponsored by The Fragrance Foundation. These awards celebrate everything from the smell of scent to bottle design, packaging and marketing.

This was all new information to me, and yet why should I be so surprised? The scent industry is a huge market.

Scent is big business and it is one of our main senses as a consumer. From what you squirt down your toilet bowl, dab behind your ears or roll under your armpits, this makes fragrance a global multi-billion dollar business. However it can be an emotive and cultural business experience – understanding the customer is key.

Scent plays a huge part in our lives and can instantly rekindle memories or events. Forest fresh magic tree creates good memories of my mum, who passed away many years ago, and her first car – a Hillman Imp complete with no seat belts and dodgy bodywork – and her crazy car tours of Scotland. On the flipside, when I catch a whiff of the designer perfume she always wore, to me it smells rancid.

Scents mean different things to different people, and culturally and geographically we enjoy different smells. Scent or fragrance is big business and it is a global market – fragrance houses have large scale R&D programmes to find out what we like and why. Understanding what sells where and trends in fragrance is the inside intelligence, such as an upcoming summit by the Fragrance Foundation Arabia where bridging innovations in scent style and packaging in eastern, western and Arabic cultures differs and comes together.

Culture plays a big part in what we buy. In a recent BBC4 documentary series, Perfume, the effect of emerging economies on the global scent market – yes, perfume to toilet cleaner – was interesting to note. Brazil is the fastest growing scent market but they do not like orange, chocolate or coffee-based scents, which are consumables readily available in Brazil and so considered cheap. Avon, the global cosmetics brand, reports that 20% of their global sales are from Brazil alone. Brazilians like themselves and their houses (from air freshner to laundry liquid) to smell expensive.

Many in the scent industry know that light fresh scents are big business and that the heavy oriental fragrances are less in demand. However new markets in the Gulf States are now specifically requesting heavy and musty scents, and an old English perfume house Grossmith is now selling directly to that market.   

Whether it is household lemon toilet cleaner, young adult male spicy bodyspray, or high end neroli blossom infused parfum you can be sure that the R&D invested and intelligence gathered in any of these products shows the risk of getting it so wrong could be catastrophic. Bottom line – know your market by gathering the intelligence from the coal face.

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