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Industry perspectiveFRAGRANCES

On the scentThe art and science of creating a brand’s signature fragranceMARITA VAN OLDENBORGH interviews MARCELLA BARTOLETTI, Global Fragrance Director at UnileverUnilever Italy Holdings S.r.l., Business Park, Via Ugo Bassi 2, Milano, 20159, Italy

Marita van Oldenborgh

Fragrances are essential to almost all of Unilever’s household and personal care brands – and they always have been. The smell of the original Sunlight Soap was just as unmistakeable and well-loved way back when as the scent of Dove is now.That consumers overwhelmingly ask for fragranced home and personal care products is nothing new. People want their laundry not only to be clean but to smell fresh, their home not only to be clean, but smell clean. They want a shower gel to be invigorating or relaxing or refreshing, and fragrance plays a big part in delivering that. Imagine burying your face in a freshly laundered, fluffy towel. The power of scent to evoke childhood memories, emotions and wellbeing is something that has long been recognised.Today, though, getting a brand’s scent right is more important than ever.Functional benefits are still fundamental but no longer sufficient to sustain brand growth in a highly competitive market. Winning consumers and brand loyalty is increasingly about creating a deep and lasting emotional connection with brands. The kind that makes a shopper in a crowded supermarket aisle go for your brand every time and, if one day she finds it’s not there, leave empty-handed and look for it in another shop. Fragrance has that power. What’s more, in tough economic times, the potential for fragrance to be a key differentiator and driver of consumer choice is more important than ever.This article looks at how one of the biggest consumer goods companies in the world, Unilever, goes about identifying, developing, and nurturing the right scent for the brand.

HOW DOES “CLEAN” SMELL?

How do you create a brand’s signature scent? A scent that communicates what the brand stands for, as well as what it does, and what consumers want? Especially when that brand’s consumers may be spread over more than a hundred countries from Venezuela to Vietnam?

The answer lies in combining a deep understanding of the brand and its consumers with excellent fragrance creation and product formulation expertise and

bringing as much method to the madness as possible. “It is the hardest thing to do but, when you get it right, it is so rewarding”,

says Marcella Bartoletti, Global Fragrance Director for Unilever. “Not only do you have to really understand what consumers are looking for in a certain product, you then have to translate that into a fragrance that fulfills all those expectations, which works in the formulation, and is iconic for your brand. It is no small task”. Bartoletti cites the Dove bar as a classic example of “getting it right”. The original Dove bar fragrance signature is essentially unchanged since 1957, just evolved slightly to stay relevant to its loyal consumers. The real test, she says, is this: you can take a Dove bar home, throw

away the packaging and use it repeatedly until it has changed in shape and the Dove logo imprinted on the bar has washed

away. The only thing visibly that is left is a piece of white soap. Yet, when you wash your hands with it, the

fragrance, the feel and the foaming effect all combine to instantly evoke the brand and the brand promise of gentle cleansing and moisturising.

UNDERSTAND YOUR BRAND

Method is crucial. Because fragrance is so emotive, everybody has an opinion, and usually a different one at that. In a big, global company with billion

Marcella Bartoletti

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euro brands, a robust system for ensuring that fragrance is managed coherently, viably and in line with the brand vision around the world is essential, Bartoletti explains.In Unilever, that system is emphatically centred on the brands. In the past few years, the company has reorganised the way it manages fragrances to ensure that the capability is both R&D-based and at the same time focused on bringing fragrances much closer to the brand. “The focus is on managing fragrances as part of the total brand equity and continually striving for excellence and leadership in fragrance design and olfactive directions, technology, sustainability… all quality aspects of consumer-facing fragrance management” says David Blanchard, SVP of R&D Categories.Put simply, Unilever has four key pillars of fragrance capability for its home and personal care brands. Three of these need to be optimised: a functional one to cue efficacy, an emotional one to cue the brand equity, and a cost one to ensure value. The fourth is non-negotiable: fragrance must be managed in line with the company’s vitality mission. Vitality, as the company website sets out1, means its brands aim to help people feel good, look good and get more out of life, and also guides the company’s way of doing business. Together these four pillars of fragrance capability - efficacy, emotional, cost and vitality - help to deliver the ultimate goal of winning brands. Various tools, techniques and training approaches are used to ensure that fragrance is consistently treated as an essential and influential element in the whole brand mix. Each brand has a defined scent imprint, identifying what fragrance elements are core to the brand and why. A specially developed, unique common fragrance language called Unifragrance facilitates clarity and communication, independent of regional and cultural differences, and the background and experience of the user. Based on that brand scent imprint and other tools, a brand-centred fragrance strategy is pursued.

THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS

The fragrance management framework to support that brand-centred approach has several elements.The first is the company’s own inhouse fragrance experts, who combine an intimate understanding of their particular brand or category of brands with extensive perfume training at one of the top Perfumery Schools in the world, Givaudan. “Essentially, we are the inhouse strategic nose of a brand and a category. We are immersed in our brands and maintain a very close relationship with our Fragrance House partners”, explains Patricia Soyer, Global Fragrance Manager. “We act as a bridge between the perfumers, R&D and the marketing teams, drawing out the best from all sides”, adds Christa Kuhnel, Deodorants Category Fragrance Manager.Building on this, a strategic collaboration with designated fragrance house partners ensures that Unilever combines inhouse expertise and consumer understanding with an open innovation approach to harness the best technology and expertise across the industry.Thus a brand’s olfactive signature is developed through internal fragrance capability expertise with help from the world’s biggest fragrance houses and their finest expert noses.Additionally, there are centralised and coordinated technical and regulatory fragrance support resources within the business.

GLOBAL YET LOCAL

One of the biggest challenges in managing fragrance in a multinational consumer goods company is scale. How global can a brand’s signature scent be? The desire to deliver value for consumers drives brands to seek efficiencies and make a scent work in as many markets as possible, but the commitment to understanding consumers and their scent preferences in local markets would tend to lead to more variation. How does the company reconcile this apparent conflict?Unilever brands are sold in nearly every country and are present in half the households on the planet. Most of them contain fragrances or flavours, so the potential for achieving economies of scale is huge. “But you have to balance global scale with local realities and preferences, especially when it comes to fragrance”, says Bartoletti. “Climate, habits and olfactive roots all play a role – for example, what smells clean and comforting to me has probably got something to do with the soap my mother used. Exposure can be important too: if I moved from Italy to China, at first I might find the different smells strange, but after ten years, my preferences might well have changed”.In reality, global is the ideal but not at all costs. One of the latest and highly successful fragrance variants of Axe deodorant, Dark Temptation, sells in 55 countries and counting. By contrast, the cleaning brand Lysoform is a household name in Italy where its citrus, aromatic and amber accented scent is the traditional smell of hygiene, but it does not have the same resonance elsewhere. In the UK, for example, a fragrance with a recognisable hypochlorite smell is generally preferred as signalling clean.And it is not just the fragrance itself but the intensity of the fragrance and the different fragrance ‘moments’, habits and usage where consumer preferences can vary, Bartoletti points out. In the case of a laundry fragrance, much depends on washing habits. If you use a washing machine, the blooming effect during the wash is not important, because it happens in the machine; what is more important is the smell when you dose, on the wet clothes and, later, on the dry clothes. “Whereas when you handwash, the blooming while you wash is everything” she says, “it is the moment when a hard chore can give some pleasure”.Supply management issues can play a role too. Bases may be produced with the same raw materials but local sourcing

FRAGRANCES - Supplement to Household and Personal Care TODAY - n 1/2010

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FRAGRANCES - Supplement to Household and Personal Care TODAY - n 1/2010

of those raw materials can produce very slight differences in the bases that can be enough to make the fragrance smell different in the formulation, necessitating adjustments. Climate – temperature and humidity – can also necessitate regional adjustments.

SAFE AND SUSTAINABLE

One constant that does not vary by region, however, is safety. Unilever applies the same safety and environmental standards globally and requires all its partners to apply those same standards. Fragrance ingredients are selected from an approved list of both natural and synthetic ingredients and the company claims its standards are often set tighter than the fragrance industry norms and than regulations require. To minimise environmental footprint, the aim is to use only what is absolutely necessary to achieve the desired quality and performance. A separate Safety and Environmental Assurance Centre (SEAC) assesses product safety continuously, from the first product idea right through to final pre-market assessment and in-market monitoring. SEAC is also heavily involved in research to advance understanding of ingredient and product safety, including fragrance ingredients. Natural fragrance ingredients are subjected to the same rigorous safety and sustainability standards that are applied to synthetic ingredients and obtained from sustainable sources where available. The company also actively participates in various fragrance industry organisations including the International Fragrance Association (IFRA) and the Research Institute for Fragrance Materials (RIFM). “160 million times a day, someone somewhere chooses a Unilever product; this highlights the importance of being always responsible in everything we do for consumer safety, and for the social and environmental impact” says Isabelle Esser, VP Fragrance Capability.

CONCLUSION

To highlight its strategic focus on fragrance excellence, in April 2009, the company hosted the first biennial Unilever Fragrance Awards, recognising achievement in applied fragrances. A judging panel of world-renowned industry experts selected winners in eight categories including best fragrance creation, best iconic signature fragrance, best fragrance technology, best fragrance simplification and most innovative fragrance.

Geneviève Berger, Chief R&D Officer and sponsor of what was billed as the first in the fragrance industry to recognise applied fragrances in the mass market, stated: “I want these awards to involve, inspire and educate all of us across the organisation about the importance of fragrance for our marketing mix in driving and sustaining outstanding business results”. Unilever CEO Paul Polman also attended and gave the awards at the ceremony in London.The awards showcased some of the “exciting directions in applied fragrances that we are interested and actively involved in right now, in our pursuit of iconic brand fragrances” according to Bartoletti.

Looking ahead, she sees a broad trend towards better quality fragrances in home and personal care products, including the ability to do more with less, such as through encapsulation technology. Many consumer trends have dramatic implications for fragrances, she points out. For example, concern about the availability of water is driving development of washing methods and technology that use more concentrated products and require less rinsing – even no water perhaps – all with major implications for fragrance.

What won’t change is the importance of fragrance in consumer products. “Our sense of smell is the one of our five senses that can never be switched off because it is related to breathing; it is the hardest sense for consumers to verbalise, yet it triggers such strong emotions. No matter how good your product is, scent memory has been proved to be more evocative and longer-lasting than sight, so much so that if a shopper doesn’t like the smell, they will never buy it again” Bartoletti points out. “So surely fragrance is always going to be a powerful driver of consumer choice”.

REFERENCES AND NOTES

1. http://www.unilever.com/aboutus/ See also: http://www.unilever.com/mediacentre/news/

makingscentsexpertnosesputtothetest.aspx http://www.unileverfragranceawards2009.com/