Breaking the Glass:
Global Fragrance House (NDA)

“Where Do We Actually Win and Lose?”

The client is a major global fragrance manufacturer with a portfolio spread across mass, masstige and selective channels. Because of contractual obligations I can’t reveal the name, but it’s the kind of portfolio most people instinctively associate with “this must be one of the big groups I see everywhere”.

Their question was not tactical. It wasn’t “what campaign should we run next?”. It was a structural question:

“Across the whole customer journey — where exactly do we win, where do we leak, and how do we grow share without simply spending more?”

At Publicis, I led the workstream that pulled the category apart into stages, signals and systems: national beauty chains, multi-brand online platforms, search, social, TV, digital video, loyalty ecosystems and review surfaces.

Awareness Was Fine. Preference Was Not.

When we plotted the full journey, the result was almost uncomfortable in its clarity. Awareness was not the problem. The portfolio was visible everywhere that mattered: on shelves, in hero placements, in advertising.

The leaks happened later — at:

• Preference — the moment someone stands in front of a fragrance wall or scrolls a digital grid and has to choose one bottle;
• Loyalty — the moment it’s time to refill or switch, and habits are either reinforced or broken by someone else’s promotion.

In plain language: the group paid to enter the conversation, but didn’t fully engineer what happens from “I know this brand” to “I choose this brand again and again”.

Teaching Fragrances to Speak Digital

Most fragrance content behaves as if dropping fruits and flowers next to a bottle is enough. It isn’t. That’s decoration, not communication. It doesn’t transmit the scent, it fills the frame.

I designed a sensory content framework — a way to estimate and benchmark how well visuals and copy actually make you feel the fragrance through a screen.

We then benchmarked the client’s assets against the full competitive field in mass and masstige, and produced a ranked gap-map: where the portfolio needed to evolve to win preference, not just share impressions.

Using Retail Ecosystems as an Engine, Not a Backdrop

The second blind spot was structural. Large beauty ecosystems — national chains, multi-brand platforms, subscription boxes — all run their own loyalty universes: tiers, points, personalized offers, events, early access mechanics.

Most brands treat these systems as a backdrop: “we’re listed, we’re in the catalog, we appear in rotation sometimes”. A small set of competitors treat them as a separate battleground and, predictably, dominate repeat purchases.

We unpacked how these ecosystems actually work for fragrances and turned them into a loop, not a random sequence.

For the client this translated into concrete playbooks: how to participate, how often, with which offers, and what success should actually look like beyond “we ran a promo”.

Seeing Reviews as a Landscape, Not as Stars

In fragrances, reviews are not just a vanity metric. They are the quiet, accumulated argument that either confirms “buy” or quietly redirects a shopper elsewhere.

Instead of counting stars, I built a reputation horizon across key environments: how dense, how recent, how specific and how aligned with the intended story each brand really is.

For each major environment we defined the mechanics: when to ask, how to ask, what kind of post-purchase touch nudges people to leave a credible, specific review instead of a generic star.