Marionnaud Launch Blind-Smell Initiative {Fragrance News}
Photo ©The Scented Salamander
French beauty & perfume chain store Marionnaud have launched an innovative blind smell initiative to promote fragrance sales this holidays season called La Collection du Parfumeur...
It is a marketing approach destined to encourage customer interactive experience with the store perfume offerings.
An in-store display showing a collection of 15 color-coded, generic spray perfume bottles revealing little except for their olfactory pyramids of notes, if you wish to pay closer attention to their white labels, is an invitation to smell blind the perfumes they contain.
Three families of perfumes are on offer: the floral family, the fruity one and the oriental family, each one being called a "sélection". Each of those categories are represented by 5 different juices, the idea being that you can then narrow down your preferences further, or on the contrary explore their breadth.
Photo ©The Scented Salamander
The concept rests on the idea that each individual has an almost innate predilection for a given family of perfumes, the one which corresponds best to their personality.
In our experience, the colorful display attracts your eye first appearing to be a new range of perfumes due to the name "La collection du parfumeur", which sounds like a private, new special range under the Marionnaud brand. Soon enough you play with the perfume bottles and here and there recognize some familiar olfactory profiles which are sometimes hard to put a name on.
While the labels offer note descriptions, it is clear that it is much more fun to try to guess which perfume meshes best with your taste, blind, or semi-blind. In fact, the game takes over your wish to read the notes.
When a scent feels particularly familiar, you then realize that none of those juices are new creations. They are designer perfumes, famous ones sometimes. The names are inscribed on the cardboard underneath the flacons.
There are boxes with 5 miniatures of your / her / his favorite family of perfumes which you / they can smell at length at home and decide which one you / they would like to redeem.
This blind smell testing is of course inspired by a habit which is much more prevalent among wine tasters.
Without testing on skin, it felt like the perfumes were much more generic or typical in their personalities through this experience, which seemed to reflect the packaging, but to a certain extent also the reality of the market which is submurged by smell-alikes.
Olfactive purism or meta statement on the flood of generic perfumes? This is of course a blogger's point of view. For Marionnaud, it is one more playful means to engage the customer to sample perfumes with a quizz game.
