Business Plan Footnotes
Developing A Hook
Guaranteed To Sell Your Perfume
Part II
Here are some more examples of strong hooks. They are presented to help you understand the "hook" concept when developing a marketing plan for your own perfume. The key to making a strategy work for you is adapting it to your market and your resources. What you want here is to absorb the ideas behind these promotions. You can't succeed with a new perfume simply by throwing it out there. Your marketing strategy has to include a reason for your perfume being something special enough so that people will buy it. To succeed you must have a good hook.
Here now are strategies that have been used by others.
Nicole Amy, "Stiletto"
The concept is a fragrance contained in a stiletto shoe shaped bottle and packaged in what looked like an elegant shoe box. The marketer was a young woman who managed to get good press over her concept and distribution in some regional boutiques. She has now expanded her distribution to a number of regions.
How successful has the promotion been? I don't know, but I do suspect that the packaging and theme have taken it a lot farther than it might have gone in a plain bottle and box. People I showed it to (I purchased a bottle and liked it) were impressed, both by the packaging and the scent. Anyway, having been introduced in 2010, it is still available and new posts continue to appear for it on Facebook.
Playboy Fragrances for Men
Playboy partnered with Coty to produce a line of fragrances. For a 2010 launch, a mobile phone user could take a picture of a Playboy Playmate featured in a special ad and send it to Playboy at a special address and in return would receive "exclusive images and videos" an an app that would allow secure online ordering of Playboy fragrances.
Florida Water
A mixture of essential oils and alcohol. The "Florida Water" name became generic but "Murray & Lanman's" was probably the best known brand. Inexpensive to prepare, Florida Water was advertised for its therapeutic value, much the same way 4711, Johann Marie Farina's Cologne, and Hungary Water had been promoted in Europe. Only lightly scented, Florida Water sold well to respectable, middle class American women who enjoyed fragrance but believed the use of "French perfumes" would mark them as fallen women.
"Romancing Singapore"
In 2003 the city of Singapore held a festival commemorating love and romance. Arrangements were made for students at Singapore Polytechnic to create both a men's and a woman's fragrance for the event. 3,000 15 ml bottles were produced, distributed and sold in 9 days. Later, with commercial assistance, additional bottles of a larger size were produced and sold successfully.
"The Pope's Cologne"
The Pope's Cologne was created from a formula said to be a favorite of Pope Pius IX. It has been marketed to and through Roman Catholic institutions and for one special promotion, the gift of a Holy Card impregnated with the Pope's Cologne using micro encapsulation technology was included with the purchase.
The Pope's Cologne received widespread publicity when launched in 2007 and today Excelsis offers both men's and woman's fragrance products, including a new men's cologne honoring Pope Francis.
Coty, "La Rose Jacqueminot"
In 1904 François Coty was trying to break into the perfume business, having no background or backing in a very competitive field. Frustrated at his failure to gain the attention of a buyer at a major department store, Coty smashed a bottle of his new fragrance on the floor and was immediately surrounded by women asking what it was and where they could buy it.
The store took notice and gave Coty an order for 12 bottles of La Rose Jacqueminot. Within weeks the perfume had became famous in Paris and other stores ordered. Coty was on his way to becoming a very wealthy man.
It has been suggested that the women gathering around Coty's broken bottle were hired to play this role.
There is more
The monthly Club Newsletter of the Perfume Makers & Marketers Club is a regular source of strategies and business plan sketches that could inspire a "big idea" that would help make your new perfume a financial success. You can learn more about the Club here.
Other articles in this series:
#1 How To Write Your Most Important Business Plan Ever
#2 Funding Your New Perfume
#3 Developing A Hook Guaranteed To Sell Your Perfume, Part I
Homemade perfumes generally lack commercial value, regardless of how wonderful they may be, because their creators fail to record how their perfumes were made. To profit from a perfume, to sell it, to sell the rights to it, or have somebody sell it for you, you must be able to make more of it. To make more you need the formula, the record of how the perfume was made: what materials were used and how much of each material was used. While the formula is nothing more than a recipe, a simple piece of paper, it is the key to unlocking your perfume's commercial potential. With the formula in your hand you have the ability to make a few dozen bottles more or, like the celebrities, tens of thousands of bottles. How to create an international production formula for your homemade perfume is a guide to getting you started on the right foot, correctly documenting everything you do as you are doing it, and then using these notes with some basic mathematics to write a simple, accurate, universal formula for your perfume. Writing formulas for your perfumes can change the way you think about them. With your formulas in hand your creations are no longer "here today, gone tomorrow." Now, thanks to your library of formulas, your perfumes become immortal!
While much is written about perfume – the beautiful fragrances... the beautiful bottles – little is available on the "mechanics" of perfume production – the steps that take place on the "factory floor" where a beautiful vision is turned into a finished product, a "ready to sell" perfume. Now you can experience all of these steps, hands on, by making just one quart of your own perfume. If you follow each chapter and do what you are instructed to do, you will end up with from 8 to 64 bottles of your own perfume, depending on the capacity of the bottles you select. Along this "insiders journey," each step is profusely illustrated with professional color photographs and you'll learn — • Exactly what alcohol you'll need and where to get it • Why you'll want (just a little!) water in your perfume • What type bottles you'll need and why you cannot use others • Why you will use a spray and not a cap • How to fill and seal your bottles • How to label your bottles with the correct information so they will be legal for sale • How to select a name for your perfume that will allow you to acquire powerful trademark rights free. If you are a developer of scents you are encouraged to use one of your own for this project. If you are not a scent creator yourself you'll learn how to get a fragrance oil that is exactly right for this project. Online sources are given for all required supplies and materials. Nothing can hold you back from starting your project immediately!
Perfume is famous for the markup it can achieve, even for a middle market fragrance. While "everybody knows" that perfume costs next to nothing to make (not completely true) the making of it is often considered an esoteric secret. "Creating Your Own Perfume With A 1700 Percent Markup!" details how a 3-person company with no experience created their own fragrance in response to a marketing opportunity that was too good to pass up. The book explains exactly what was done to create a fragrance for that opportunity but it is far more than a history of the author's project. "Creating Your Own Perfume With A 1700 Percent Markup!" lays out every step in the process of creating your own perfume, either as a do-it-yourself project – and without the benefit of automated equipment some compromises and workarounds are required – or full bore professional production under your supervision. Either way you will be producing a quality fragrance at a remarkably low cost. Do you have a marketing opportunity that would be wildly profitable if only you could obtain your fragrance at a ridiculously low cost? "Creating Your Own Perfume With A 1700 Percent Markup!" is the guide you need to do it.
A really great name, a special name that is just right for a particular perfume or perfume marketer (or entrepreneur with money to invest!) can be worth a ton of money. But few individuals with great ideas ever manage to cash in on those brilliant ideas. Instead they wait while others "discover" their idea, acquire legal rights to it and make all the money while they are left out in the cold without a penny having been earned for what was once THEIR idea.
If you are struggling to name your perfume and are looking for a name that will have real value, "Naming Your Perfume And Protecting Your Name" will help you weed out low value names and point you to names that have better marketing value plus the potential to become valuable assets in themselves.
If you have a great name you want to protect but no fragrance, "Naming Your Perfume And Protecting Your Name" will guide you through the simple steps you must take to acquire a legal right to that name before someone else grabs it! Best of all, "Naming Your Perfume And Protecting Your Name" shows you how to gain strong legal protection for your name without a lawyer and without spending more than pocket change.
Never had an idea for a product name? Never thought much about perfume? "Naming Your Perfume And Protecting Your Name" may stimulate your interest in a whole new game that, when played well, can make you lots of money without your having to leave the comfort of your home office.
You can build a perfume business of your own using this business plan as a guide. By following its detailed strategy you learn to identify motivated groups of potential perfume buyers. Members of these groups are near the tipping point of desire for a new perfume. You don't know these people and they don't know you but you know a marketer they trust, one who does not currently sell perfume and might never think of selling perfume were it not for your approach. Here is where you step in with a professional plan, promotion, and perfume to take advantage of this ripe opportunity for mutual profit. Before your first promotion has peaked, you will already be developing a relationship with your next marketing partner. Following this plan, you will gain more and more profit with each new marketing partnership.
Now when you make your own perfume you can make it fully "commercial" meaning you will be creating a product ready for regular, continuous sales to friends, relatives, and the public! If the fragrance you've made has already won praise, why not share it with others? Some might pay you for it and want it for their web stores or retail boutiques! Creating your own perfume from dropper bottles: Methods, mechanics, and mathematics guides you through steps that can turn your hobby project into a perfume business. Discover how close you are now and how little more you must do to take what you made with essential oils and dropper bottles into a business of your own! For an introduction to this book, watch this video.
When you name a perfume you create a valuable asset – the name itself. To sell your perfume you want the most effective name possible. But a good name can have value beyond the edge it gives your sales. In naming your fragrance you are creating a trademark and a trademark can have value independent of the product. The value of that trademark can vary. Much depends on how well, in naming your perfume, you follow the trademark "rules." How To Create A More Valuable Name For Your Perfume first helps you develop a name that will be effective in selling your perfume. It then prods you to make use of certain techniques that can turn a good name into a great trademark, strong and valuable. If you have questions about how to protect a name, How To Create A More Valuable Name For Your Perfume will answer many such as:
- Can you protect your name yourself or do you need a lawyer?
- Can you register a trademark without a lawyer?
- What does it cost to register a trademark?
- How do I enforce the rights I have established?
How To Create A More Valuable Name For Your Perfume covers both state, federal, and international protection.
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Philip Goutell
Lightyears, Inc.
