Abstract:

One year and a half before SAMSARA’s launch, the French perfume house GUERLAIN asked us to study the project and give information upon which to base strategic choices. We custom-tailored a two-step qualitative investigation, the first about the ideal scent among six which were being developed and the second on the coherency of all the elements of the marketing mix, both without any mention of the brand for purposes of confidentiality. We call our approach "high touch" because it is a precise, very structured yet intuitive one which takes into account the subjectivity of the consumers’ relationship to scents. It is a dynamic developmental method which places a marketing project in its ever-changing environment and takes hypotheses about the future into account, contrarily to static assessment approaches.