How to Kill Your Perfume Brand in 10 Days or The Deadly Power of Bad Content
There are countless books on stand-up comedy and humor writing that break down what makes a text funny. Loads of guides on how to craft copy for functional products that actually converts. Fashion, travel, and even wine writing have their own well-documented methods of seducing through words. Yet there seems to be nothing on fragrance copywriting. Just a swamp of poorly written copy that is now being reprocessed by AI into a different kind of weak copy – but let’s save that discussion for later.
At the end of the day, no book or guide can teach someone to write copy that moves people if they don’t have the talent for it. Yet, those who describe fragrances could benefit from thinking about it in a more structured way.
With this piece, we are kicking off a series on content strategy and copywriting that makes readers feel, dream... and want.
Content Strategy
You’d think it's straightforward that there are different types of assets, each has its own audience and serves a specific purpose. Yet, in the real world of niche perfumery, there seems to be a lot of confusion around that which leads to strategically weak outputs.
To start, a few distinctions to keep in mind…
#1. Product copy serves a different purpose from brand copy, and it should sound different, too.
For example, humor can work well in texts that support your overall brand concept, but when it comes to product descriptions, wit rarely converts. You can use some product copy to reinforce your brand, but not every product needs to carry the full weight of your brand storytelling.
With that in mind, before crafting product copy,
Determine what strategic purpose the product serves in your portfolio
We wrote about this in more detail earlier, but essentially, you need to ask yourself these two questions:
Is this product destined to be a cash cow or a branding vehicle? This determines whether the copy should primarily sell or generate media interest.
Should it help you capture new markets/customer segments or appeal to brand loyalists? This determines how far the product copy can shift from your brand narrative.
Consider the stage of your brand’s evolution
Are you still building your brand, or already cynically leveraging it?
The more established your brand becomes, the more you can let product copy drift from brand storytelling into the shameless territory of impulse nudging. Or, if a product has breakout potential, you can give it even more freedom – until it eventually builds its own name and starts taking care of the aging “parent”, like all hits usually do.
But if you are new to the market, it's a different story. There aren't many other touchpoints consumers can interact with in a meaningful way – besides the product itself. So, the product copy needs to introduce and promote the brand.
#2. Your most important readers aren't consumers.
In niche fragrance business, brand-generated content isn’t as powerful as external reviews when it comes to directly driving interest or sales. But it has a strategic purpose – it shapes those reviews. Retailers will default to official copy when nothing else is available or no training is provided to sales associates. Bloggers and social media reviewers will occasionally read it and get inspired. YouTubers and TikTok vloggers will often quote it directly at the start of their videos (and many will even say “you need to fire your copywriter” if they are sensitive to the written word).
These early messengers are the prime audience of your copy. At the very least, it should help them create interesting, unique content that, in turn, will drive sales.
And if you want to adapt it for different creator profiles receiving your PR packages – so they don’t all build their reviews around the same script – who said you can’t? ;)
This brings us to different types of assets. If shorter and punchier copy works better for consumer ads, emails and press releases, your brand’s website is where you can actually house more substantial content quite safely. Unless you are a DTC-first brand (we’ll cover those separately), chances are consumer traffic to your brand’s website is minimal, especially during the discovery phase when concise, high-impact product copy is what matters. Creators, though, have a different motivation – they actively need material for their content. They want to be informative and useful. So, they (especially the second wave of reviewers who deliberately choose to cover your perfume without your brand’s outreach) are far more likely to visit your brand’s website and read the slightly lengthier copy. And like it or not, if it fails to help them create strong content, this can sink your brand before it even gets off the ground.
This isn’t pure theory. Retailers have openly said they chose to onboard certain brands because of their thoughtful brand booklets or informative websites. YouTubers and other reviewers often express frustration with the lack of information on brand websites. Even journalists and editors point to it as a recurring issue: they rarely have time to chase brands for details, so unclear or generic text can mean losing press coverage altogether.
So, it makes sense to fill the website with
brief but meaty metaphors,
intriguing background facts,
scientific oddities,
unusual comparisons and clever parallels,
reviews from early testers
and other blurbs that can be easily plugged into external reviews as is or inspire compelling original takes. Twink-twink: let us know if you need help with that!
Lastly, be mindful of how you organize the content. Take control over what different creators see first on your website – set it to dynamically change or use personalized links that lead to tailored content for different segments of creators. The more variety you introduce there – the more diverse their reviews will be, and the more likely consumers will be to seek more reviews. You need to start the snowball rolling in the right direction, and this engineered variety is what will help the buzz look more organic, especially if you pace out your PR sends.
