When I discuss the changing trends in marketing in both men’s and women’s fragrances, my focus is the franchise end of the fragrance lines, primarily in department stores.
We as marketers have become more adept at encouraging what has always heen there; that is the need for fragrance. Key changes in the marketing of fragrances, and in the acceptance of fragrances, have happened over the past five or six years. I think Avon and Jovan are both good examples of terrific approaches to marketing because they have always directed their sale to the individual self-purchase. By and large, companies have not done this. In the past six years, this self-purchase has helped create a 46% increase in the women’s fragrance business. Somewhere between 88% and 92% of adult women today use fragrance on a regular basis. In 1970, the figure was 72%.
Seventeen published a study that indicated that in 1970 the average beginning age for wearing a fragrance was 14. Today, that age is 12. They have always been interested in the fragrances their mothers used. Now a number of companies have introduced light, citrus fragrances geared toward younger girls, bringing them into the market earlier.
