BBC PERFUME DOCUMENTARY PART 1, "SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEW"

This three part BBC documentary released in 2013 gives insights into the perfume industry, the artistry of perfume and commercializing it. I gained a lot of knowledge from it which is beneficial for my upcoming study and I found it extremely interesting and eye opening.


PART 1, "SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEW"
What I learnt and thought...

What I learnt from this part is how the adverts, bottle and name are all ingredients for the recipe on how to successfully sell a perfume, but for it to be made an icon in the market and be bought over and over again, it is the quality of the substance inside the bottle that truly counts. The largest question asked to fix perfume marketing executives is: how do you make a new perfume stand out from the crowd? This is because this market is so highly competitive, and so each stage of the production is vital and very carefully done by meticulous individuals. The industry is so competitive because nobody actually needs another perfume, so when something is launched into the market, a 'good' or 'average' perfume product is simply not good enough. It is vital that a new perfume doesn't smell like any other new releases at the time.

As scent is literally invisible, the bottle initially has a larger role in appealing to consumers, making it the most potent selling tool. In this part of the documentary, insights into the production process and release of a new Tommy Hilfiger fragrance (at the time) are given. Their aim is to produce a fragrance that will appear to generation Y to widen the consumer audience, and so they decided to use music as a theme for the product. It is explained how generation Y are the most elusive, and how they're an important sector of the market audience as they're the future. The key adjective used to describe this generation is 'creative', and they know best how to distinguish what is marketed and what is actually sold. Chad Levine, a major perfume bottle designer, designed the bottle for this Hilfiger fragrance, and created a bottle and case that mimics a record, with features that represent parts of instruments, and textures/indentations that represent sound-waves. The product was named 'LOUD'. Watching these stages of production enabled me to understand how the design decisions are made, and how carefully the consumer audience and chosen concepts are considered during the process.

Overall from this section, I gained an understanding of how competitive the industry is, how much work goes into perfecting a perfume before it is released to the public, and how important customer responses are during first release. A shocking fact I learnt is that the industry does 60% of it's business during the last quarter of the year because of the Christmas period.

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