Engineered Accidentality in Fragrance: from Mall Strips to Guerrilla Stunts
The most powerful fragrance love stories happen by accident. They begin when someone catches an unexpected waft of something interesting – when they aren't expecting to smell anything at all. When they are not mentally prepared to evaluate and compare, not focused on what they are smelling, not trying to rationalize a future purchase. This doesn't happen when they order samples online, go to a perfume expo, or visit a fragrance brand’s boutique – but when they catch an intriguing sillage from a stranger, borrow someone’s jacket, or accidentally find a sample or a scented paper strip somewhere unexpected.
Brands that foster this kind of discovery often get the most loyal clientele. So do those who manufacture serendipity and weave it into their core marketing approach – by deliberately creating situations where consumers encounter a fragrance outside the deliberate context of fragrance shopping.
Imagine you are a single person trying to date in a metropolis. Who would you fall for – your 52nd first date from an app who asks what you are looking for – or the random guy whose dog knocked you over this morning and who then treated you to an ice cream, and it turned out you were lactose intolerant? By the way, the second guy could have read Neil Strauss and totally fabricated the entire accident – and it still worked better than the app.
But regardless of the intentionality, this kind of approach requires time. Years of slow organic buildup. And patience and tolerance for low conversion in exchange for higher loyalty and customer lifetime value.
The core principle is that you are broadening your targeting to people outside of the fragrance enthusiast core – which by default means lower conversion. It is also conditional on being a certain type of brand – juice-forward rather than concept-forward (the idea is that people will accidentally smell the fragrance and fall in love – not that they will learn about the concept and get intrigued). Lastly, the fragrances should be priced accessibly – because broader targeting means most of those people won’t easily comprehend that a fragrance can cost $400.
So, you cast a wide net – not filtering by category consumption, income, note preference, or anything else. But here is the catch – through your tactics, you indirectly target specific situational states where these undifferentiated people are. You don’t target a fragrance enthusiast sitting on a boring sofa of their own home – you target someone with no clue about fragrance at places where they do something memorable. Sponsor a rave and scent the admission wristbands, bring perfumed paper strips to people waiting for a main course at an experimental restaurant, scatter scented origami frogs with your logo across the park on the first sunny day in April.
Brands are doing this on a regular basis in some shape or form – the good old unsolicited scented strips handed out in a mall, Le Labo using hotel amenities to get people to smell Santal 33, Amouage taking over a flower kiosk in Milan to put its Love Hibiscus scent in the path of passersby. But that can become the core of your marketing… if you dare. Accidentality is rewarding but, as we alluded to, difficult – conversion is low and delayed, results are hard to predict and measure, and growth is slower.
However, in a category where the product can’t be experienced through a screen, this approach may be one of the few remaining unfair advantages. Most fragrance marketing attempts to persuade consumers to smell – we are a new fragrance brand, we are this and that, do try us. Engineered accidentality reverses the process – it gets people to smell first and introduces the brand later.
