Household and Personal Care Today - Vol. 7 nr. 3 July/September 2012

MABA is founded and owned by Marcella Bartoletti former Global Fragrance Director at Unilever. A desire to explore the many facets of the power of fragrance in our daily lives is at the basis of this five-part series. The author, together with other experts, will take the reader through a journey across the multiple aspects to be taken into consideration, the commonalities as well as the various challenges, and the critical

market/ business imperatives to be handled when planning a new fragrance launch. Following a first article on Air Care, published on the No 1/2012 edition of HPC Today, here it is the opportunity to dig into a new fascinating product category: Home Care. www.marcellabartoletti.com

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ONE STEP FURTHER IN THE JOURNEY THROUGH THE POWER OF FRAGRANCE

Usually when you talk about fragrance, people think of prestige perfumes, or more generically to alcohol-based fragrances. It may make sense as these

products’ experience is entirely and purely based around the sense of smell. Somehow you have to be more accurate if you want to make somebody realize that there are so many other different types of fragrance applications which are relevant to her or his life. These include products that are typically identifi ed through their very specifi c functions in home cleaning and care: products that we need daily and cannot live without, where fragrances play a key role in driving our choices and preferences amongst the offerings. I think it would be mistaken to think that the work of perfumers, perfume houses and brand manufacturers relates only to the development of perfume oils for the fi ne fragrances or personal care products that are offered so elegantly on the shelves of perfume shops. “Fragrances for Home Care have to attract the same consumer buying Fine Fragrance as well as Body Care products. Consequently, the level of creativity has to be just as high”, says Eike Doskotz, VP Business Development Home Care EAME, Scent & Care at Symrise AG, one of the leading fragrance houses.

PART 2: HOME CARE PRODUCTS

According to a recently presented overview of the fragrance industry (1), the Home Care (HC) category, including household products and detergents, representing around 25 percent of the pie, with fi ne fragrances accounting up to around 50 percent and personal care products taking the remaining 25 percent, is in continuous evolution. The fragrance investment behind the HC sector, within which laundry is the single largest category for fragrance usage in all

regions (2), highlights the size of the opportunity. Main brand manufacturers in the FMCG industry are in fact amongst the biggest clients for fragrance suppliers. They are also well aware of the need to make adequate investments to capitalize on the importance of fragrance, as they recognise how it can swing the fi nal decision on a product purchase. “Henkel sees the fragrance as an integral part of any consumer product. Due to the decisive role that the fragrance plays for the liking and perceived performance of a product, it has utmost strategic importance for our company” says Dr Anneliese Wilsch-Irrgang, Global Director Fragrances at Henkel Fragrance Centre, Henkel AG & Co KGaA, key player company in the home care business with major brands such as Persil. In this framework it is essential for FMCG companies to develop the right level of internal expertise to be able to face the global continuously evolving challenges, competition and the next frontier of fragrance innovation, creativity. “As one pillar of excellence in fragrances, Henkel runs the Henkel Fragrance Centre as an internal fragrance house, which is the competence centrer for all scent related issues. In parallel, close relationships to external core suppliers are pillars which ensure that the full range of new technologies becomes readily available for home care products” adds Dr Anneliese Wilsch-Irrgang.Whether it’s maintaining a hygienic environment, ensuring perfectly clean laundry, masking odours, or enhancing a room’s ambiance through a well done cleaning job, scents are added in this fascinating category to support and enhance the consumer experience of everyday cleaning tasks, and provide a dose of pleasure even to least glamorous of daily chores. Apologising for the example, I’d invite you, just for few seconds, to think about a dirty toilet and you would possibly agree with both Alexandra Klinge and Frank Pessel, Fragrance Marketing at Henkel Fragrance Centre, Henkel AG & Co. KGaA, that “perfumes should make our life nicer during and after cleaning, during and after using the toilet. They act

FRAGRANCES

The fragrances series - Part 2

MARCELLA BARTOLETTIVia Cassanese 41, 20090 Segrate, Milano, Italy

Household and Personal Care Today - Vol. 7 nr. 3 July/September 2012

Household and Personal Care Today - Vol. 7 nr. 3 July/September 2012Household and Personal Care Today Today T - Vol. 7 nr. 3 July/September 2012oday - Vol. 7 nr. 3 July/September 2012oday

as mood enhancers and the natural balance range in Toilet Care is an effective example… they are special because they have this air care dimension”.A winning Home Care fragrance is not created overnight and there are many challenges to be faced when developing new scents: “they should fi t to the product / concept / brand, should support the performance of the concept (hygiene, malodour, long-lastingness, degreasing, antibacterial, disinfection, sensitive, hypoallergenic, etc.), should be pleasant and performing in all product use phases, must be stable in the different diffi cult bases / formulations and fulfi l all regulatory restrictions”, says Frank Pessel.Thus, from the above, there are many different criteria to satisfy, as well as opportunities for differentiation, compared to the prestige fragrances creation where the scent is the function; in home care “perfumers have to change, rework the fragrances more often. In this respect, formulations are becoming more and more diffi cult”, adds Alexandra KlingeIn this category, where the formulations are created to have the best cleaning performance, scent is often the only perceivable indicator of the expected product effi cacy and quality. As always the most diffi cult challenge is to turn a nice-to-smell Home Care fragrance into an extraordinary and memorable one for your Home Care product and brand. Thus “fragrance has always to be unique, special” says Alexandra “and should make the ‘boring cleaning job’ nicer or joyful, leading consumers in another ‘day dream world’”, adds Frank.

WE SMELL WITH OUR BRAIN

For a long time, both science and marketing paid only little attention to this most mystical and emotional of our senses. From a scientifi c perspective, only in recent decades has the sense of smell been more thoroughly researched and until 2004, when the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was given jointly to Richard Axel and Linda B. Buck for their discoveries of “odorant receptors and the organization of the olfactory system” (3), it still was the most enigmatic of our senses. And yet there is a lot to be further investigated and understood before asserting that we know how our brain works.Most recently, I feel, there are emerging opportunities which would, if properly used, provide a valid support in understanding what is driving consumer preferences and choices. Dan Ariely & Gregory S. Berns highlighted, in 2010, in the prestigious Nature Reviews Neuroscience (4) that: “The application of neuroimaging methods to product marketing

— neuromarketing — has recently gained considerable popularity…. Although neuroimaging is unlikely to be cheaper than other tools in the near future, there is growing evidence that it may provide hidden information about the consumer experience. The most promising application of neuroimaging methods to marketing may come before a product is even released — when it is just an idea being developed”. This has found a certain application in the fragrance business as an additional tool that would provide scientifi c information about the consumer experience, adding new perspectives to data interpretation as well as limiting the issues that are often hidden in subjective evaluations. “For creating a new fragrance we work with the ‘Neuromarketing’ approach, a methodology which maps out brands and fragrances in correlation to consumers´ motives and emotional values. For example, in Europe, a lemon scent in a dishwashing product or glass cleaner evokes emotions of security and discipline, effi ciency - a typical, well known scent standing for cleanliness and degreasing power. The goal is to fi nd a scent that smells just like the brand is positioned as a kind of ‘Olfactory brand manifesto’”, says Frank Pessel.“The ‘limbic mapping’ is good to understand the links between emotion and memory – all tractable processes to measure with neuroimaging – as an approach to build a better understanding of consumer grooming behaviours”, adds Dr Francis McGlone, Director NeuroSci Ltd.Nevertheless in this “New World” we live in, the amount of data, information and sources has been exploding. Companies capture trillions of bytes of information about their consumers, customers, brands, products, suppliers, and operations, and there is a risk of a proliferation of data that are being captured, shared, communicated, aggregated, stored, and analysed. Thus, as an essential factor to success, how these are handled is of strategic importance. “Neuromarketing can be useful, but never a total solution and, as with any tool, its usefulness depends on the skill and knowledge of the user and their interpretive skills. And of course the question that is being asked”, underlines Dr Francis McGlone.

SHORT-LIVE EMOTIONS CAN HAVE LASTING EFFECTS

Fragrance has a key role in the consumer perception of brands. I’m a great believer that it is a major factor in driving consumer choice and a powerful reason to buy a brand in place of another one, not just once but over and over again. It is an essential part of the emotional signature of the brand, it is vital to the brand equity.Looking back in marketing history, we have been exposed to many defi nitions of what ‘brand’ is about. Some quite “rational” ones have been talking about a singular idea or a unique concept that is intangible, a promise that exists only in the mind of the consumer. This has led to a sort of “behavioural marketing” where the goodwill of the consumer was at the base of selling more, of brand growth (see the consumer decision-making model for marketing sales and advertising AIDA – attention, interest, desire, action - popular for over a hundred years, as an example (5)).These days you read on Harvard Business Review Blog Network, by Bill Lee president of the Lee Consulting Group: “Marketing is dead” (6). This highlights that past models were unsatisfactory or at least are not relevant any longer.Today I think, among other things, it is also vital to build on

63Household and Personal Care Today - Vol. 7 nr. 3 July/September 2012

Household and Personal Care Today - Vol. 7 nr. 3 July/September 2012

PERSIL laundry detergent

“An international popular fragrance for years up to now. The development of the currently used fragrance is based on the specifi c preferences of consumers in combination with the latest state of the art perfume technologies. This successful creation is used in various product applications e.g. liquid detergent, powder detergent, detergent tabs and mega caps”.Andreas Gerigk, Manager Fragrance Development at Henkel Fragrance Centrer, Henkel AG&Co. KGaA.

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the more we fi nd; this is a fact today and it will be tomorrow. There is no way to escape the need to develop a sustainability agenda for action. Ethical behaviours that truly go beyond just making statements and translate those words into action will be a high-return investment for brand manufacturers. “Sustainability is very important for our products: ‘achieving more with less’. Better performance at a reduced ecological footprint, effi cient use of materials, long-lasting fragrance for lower wash temperatures and short cycles”, is Alexandra Klinge’s comment.To be in the top consumer-preferred brand list also thanking superior fragrances is a major task, you have heard it before. To remain there for the future it will even be a bigger and constant effort: we will be required to run at least twice as fast as we are doing today.

REFERENCES AND NOTES

1. The International Fragrance Association, An Overview, May 21 2012, http://www.google.it/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CB4QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.casic-la.org%2Fweb%2Findex.php%3Foption%3Dcom_phocadownload%26view%3Dcategory%26download%3D348%3Aifra-overview-equador-detailed-may-2012pdf%26id%3D40%3Auncategorized%26Itemid%3D50&ei=k9w9UNu5F6Hh4QTl1YCwAw&usg=AFQjCNG8LGIoj8K_fLpV12C2D48YaRcBVg&sig2=J5vkEu9a2Jb8TjmKaA3BDQ&cad=rja

2. Passport, Fragrances: Looking beyond the scent, Jan 2012, Euromonitor, http://euromonitor.typepad.com/files/fragrances-looking-beyond-the-scent.pdf

3. http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2004/press.html

4. Neuromarketing: the hope and hype of neuroimaging in business, D. Ariely, G.S. Berns, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, April 2010, 11, 2010 Mcmillan Publishers Limited – http://www.nature.com/nrn/index.html

5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIDA_%28marketing%29, C.P. Russell, How to Write a Sales-Making Letter, Printers’ Ink, June 2 (1921).

6. Marketing is Dead, Bill Lee, Harvard Business Review Blog Network, 9 Ago 2012, http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/08/marketing_is_dead.html

7. ‘Satisfied customers tell 3 friends, angry customers tell 3,000’, running a business in today’s consumer-driven world, Pete Blackshaw http://www.tell3000.com/

the role of the senses to establish the critical, fundamental emotional connections between consumers and the brand, evolving the “behavioural marketing” model into an “experiential marketing” one where brand has become a promise wrapped in an experience, an emotion.In this more “irrational” approach, if you want, fragrance is recognised to have an incredible role in establishing this connection with the consumers, creating a unique distinctive brand olfactive signature that will stay with them for longer, in deep-seated memories and, as such, capable of making a brand be loved and not just liked, of making a brand become an icon: a classic not a falling star. For Alexandra, “consumers buy home care products to make their home a castle, choosing fragrances they like because these affect their emotions, enhance their mood whilst reassuring themselves for the well done cleaning job”.It is a favourable moment, far more than in the past, for fragrance to stand out and demonstrate its role for brand. But be careful, fl awless delivery is key to brand manufacturers as the impact of dissatisfaction can be dramatic.“Satisfi ed customers tell 3 friends, angry customers tell 3,000” writes Pete Blackshaw in his book (7).

LOOKING FORWARD TO THE FUTURE

Many things are evolving so quickly from one day to another that any attempts to forecast the future is a huge challenge, but there is no alternative and in a consumer-driven world, full of economic uncertainties as well as new extraordinary opportunities, it is a must to anticipate where we will be headed and think outside today’s comfort zones.“Concentrated formulas, long-lasting fragrances and scent systems with a depot effect are still in the focus. Smart technologies will bring new appliances and robots using novel fragrance emanation technologies The connected home will be the future”, is Frank Pessel’s forecast. And in terms of creativity “while there will still be classic fragrances for classic applications, more modern, life-style oriented fragrances with elements from other categories will take a big share of the market”, anticipates Eike Doskotz.In the safety and environmental area, the more we scratch

The sense of the smell is the hardest sense to get verbalized. I’m very convinced that the more we talk, the more we smell, the more we learn, the more we understand together. In the next article a new product category impacting our daily life will be uncovered, let’s get back together in a while to appreciate a wider range of scenting opportunities.

An international popular fragrance for years up to now. The development of the currently used fragrance is based on the specifi c preferences

An international popular fragrance for years up

Household and Personal Care Today - Vol. 7 nr. 3 July/September 2012