L’Oreal unites Giorgio Armani, Lancome, Viktor & Rolf and YSL fragrances for in-store Christmas drive
L’Oreal has created a Christmas marketing campaign that unites four of its top fragrances for the first time ever as it looks to make its products stand out in the overcrowded perfume space for festive shoppers.
Christmas is a key trading period for L’Oreal’s fragrance brands with almost half of all annual sales made during the season. The month of December alone sees the same amount of sales as January to August.
“The stakes at this time of year get incredibly higher within fragrance and every week as the market retail comes in it is double to triple what it was the week before,” Emily Byrne, marketing director, L’Oreal designer fragrances told The Drum.
“Fragrances are so popular around Christmas because they are a popular gift so we did some segmentation research this year – the first time it’s been done in the industry – and we found out that 80 per cent of fragrance shoppers have bought a product in the past 12 months as a gift for someone else, and the majority of gifters are female, so 60 per cent women and 40 per cent men.”
From the research, L’Oreal also learned that while people have a healthy appetite for buying fragrances 80 per cent aren’t confident in their choice. “Gifters have a lot of people they are buying gifts for so we wanted to offer them that choice but not so much choice that they get to the stage of being overwhelmed. In the fragrance halls there are over 300 launches a year so we wanted to pick our curated edit that can then be experienced and chosen between.”
Cue the recently launched #scentwithlove collaborative campaign, which sees Giorgio Armani Si, Lancome La Vie Est Belle, Viktor & Rolf Flowerbomb and YSL Black Opium, unite in 100 Boots stores across the country for an experiential experience. L’Oreal has installed ‘perfume post boxes’ in the selected stores where shoppers can send a post card to a loved one. They can write a message on the card and then scent it with one of the four fragrances.
So far 2000 cards have been sent and L’Oreal is hoping to drive that figure up to 10,000 before Christmas.
The next phase of the campaign began on Tuesday (1 December) and will run until 7 December, where 16 top performing Boots stores will host #scentwithlove sites where consumers can personalise a gift box with their own message and a photo uploaded from their smartphone.
If successful, L’Oreal will explore the opportunity of uniting the brands in the future. “They are four fantastic brands and if we can collaborate we will. At the same time it’s really key each have their own time to shine because they all have their own identity,” said Byrne.
The cosmetics and beauty company will monitor the number of post cards sent , posts on the Boots posts Facebook page, the retail campaign and sales of the products to measure success of the push.