Flanker Strategies

I’ve said it before: as a rule, flankers suck. It's not hard to understand how and why they suck. The goal is sales and the impetus is marketing . When goals are reiteration and demographic targeting, and the risk is straying too far from the known, creativity will be difficult to pin down. How is it then that some succeed?

A few strategies and how they play out:

Let's start at the bottom of the barrel with the unadulterated flanker, the true spirit of the practice: One-Size-Fits-All. This is the flanker at its most banal, its barest. The perfumes that fall under this rubric are those preceded or followed by any of the following: light, cool, fresh, sheer, aqua, noir or blanc. You get the picture. The market has been trained to jump and salivate at the above terms. The notion of the One-Size-Fits-All is that the original fragrance is irrelevant. Modifiers like fresh, cool, et cetera be slapped on any product. Still this strategy works best if the original perfume is composed with a sort of faceless quality, presence without intention. Adding new notes and tweaking the oringnal ones then becomes an easier proposition. Hence so many faceless flankable originals. No need to give examples here, but it is interesting to note that both the faceless originating perfumes and the flankers themselves tend to coincide with a least common denominator of gender. The masculine fragrances are those targeting a ‘guy’s guy’: straight, unadventurous, member of the pack; simple, for fear of being seen as complex. The female counterpart to this market-male assumedly wants pretty, whether beautiful or not, unmistakable, un-nuanced; loud, for fear of being missed. These marketing gender rules seem premised on the the notion that masculinity and femininity correlate with narcissistic and borderline personality disorders.

One-Size-Fits-All has a lot going for it from a marketing perspective: simplicity, seasonality, a temporary timeframe (limited edition), a pre-groomed market. From the perfume enthusiasts perspective, though, it's salted earth. No good can come from it

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A related strategy takes a recognized and successful perfume and similarly spits out a river of flankers. In this case, they may or may not use the One-Size-Fits-All names. This strategy, Milk-the-Cow, takes a commercial success, runs with it, runs into the ground, and then continues to produce annual additions for at least another 10 years. Stars here are would be Cool Water Kumquat Snowfall Fraicheur pour Super-homme and Angel Marshmallow Tinkerbell Sunessence Sprinkle-Wink pour Babydoll . Milk-the-Cow has all the tedium of one-size-fits-all, but an extra helping of dread for both the perfumer and the audience. (‘god help us, what will this holiday shopping season's version be?’)

It's not all as simple as good strategy-bad strategy, but the above strategies are in fact bad. Flankers, like Fruity-Floral and Gourmand perfumes tend to suck, but some strategies are better than others. Variations on a Theme is a wonderful strategy in the hands of pros, hence the line from Feminite du Bois to Bois de Violette. Variations gives an artist the possibility of exploring other outcomes, other possibilities. Thierry Mugler would like you to believe that all the Angel iterations are Variations on a Theme when they are actually the worst of Milking the Cow. Variations work when thoughtful: Iris Poudre and Ferrre by Gianfranco Ferre by Pierre Bourdon; Aromatics Elixir and AE Perfumer’s Reserve. How about Jicky/Shalimar and Apres l’Ondee/l’Heure Bleue.

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Two strategies that rest on the intentions of those employing them are the Bait-and-Switch, aka The Flanker-in-Name-Only, and the Pink-and-Blue. In the Bait-and-Switch, the name of the original perfume gets your attention, but the new perfume has nothing else in common with the old. Bait-and-Switch was brilliant for launching Miss Dior Cherie, which had not a thing to do with the original Miss Dior. The original Miss Dior Cherie was a gem in the netherlands between the Fruity-Floral and the Gourmand. The placement, the genre was right, but if the perfume sucked, Bait-and-Switch would have failed. But the perfume smelled good, and in conjunction with the Dior name and marketing machine, became a huge hit. Sadly, a series of reformulations of both the original and Cherie, as well as a pileup of renaming, have since left the whole Miss Dior franchise in a muddle

Pink-and-Blue, one of my least favorite strategies. It is based on the idea that anything sold to us must be gender-stamped before we could possibly understand it. This premise stems from the basic gender binary, which is exclusive rather than inclusive: an object, a manner, a quality, a desire must be masculine or feminine or be considered perverse, if not wrong. Pink-and-Blue means that if there is a feminine fragrance, there must eventually be a masculine one as well. And vice-versa. There are too many to count: Obsession, Safari, Angel, Be Delicious, Allure, Dune, Rush, Fuel for Life.

Pink-and-Blue is so ingrained everywhere else in consumption that it will likely never go away. Pink-and-Blue relies on a heterosexual couple pairing that is in fact successful in marketing. It implies everything from stability, home and family to excitement, sex and licentiousness all the while reassuring the buyer with a stable identity. Still this isn't my world of gender and I find it limiting and grating.

But out of the mud rises the Lotus, and again it's not simply the strategy that leads to success or failure, but the intention and likely a good measure of coincidence. Amouage aim for quality above all. They are the contemporary realization of the money-is-no-object sensibility. Yet even here, the almost reflexive gender binary (boy/girl) and it's luggage (straight, reproductive, nuclear family) is an implicit restraint. These restrictions have been fuel both for reaching beyond the limits and producing great perfumes (the Golds, the Jubilations) and the let-downs (Honour Man).

‘Unisex' tends to mean ‘neither’ more than ‘either’ or ‘both’, but it is an alternative. When it does succeed, the unisex approach can work intentionally (Bvlgari Black) or inadvertently (Guerlain Vetiver, Dior Eau Sauvage). The gender binary works best when the perfumer perverts it. Fracas and Bandit, Femme/Butch lesbian classics, are still unsurpassed here.

Perfumer Bernard Chant gives us a great lesson in strategy in his Lauder (and Gres) perfumes. He gave us the Bait-and-Switch, but called it Pink-and-Blue and nobody even noticed. And we think only Germaine Cellier fucked with gender and perfumery! The market appears to respond like zombies to the gender binary. It is largely unquestioning. The male buyer says, 'It says Femme, therefore I can't wear it.' The Estee Lauder perfumes of the 60s-70s-80s didn't use the Pink and Blue terminology, but they knew how to sell the image of social ambition, which has gender so thoroughly baked into it that it need not be mentioned. The Aliage/Devin country-weekend, tennis lifestyle. The urban-sophisticate, new-Oriental of Cinnabar and JHL. Azurée/Aramis, Aromatics Elixir/Aramis 900. The Lauder schtick was aspiration. It sold the Town and Country life, the best of both worlds. Implicit in this was the man-woman couple. The woman, liberated but feminine; the man, sophisticated without being gay. It's fantasy dress-up, but it's far better thought out than just (product) for women and (product) for man, the barest version of Pink-and-Blue.

Pivotal here is the work itself. These perfumes were and still are spectacular! The quality, artistry of composition, and fearlessness of these perfumes make them a pleasure to wear. What Chant did was to make a brilliant perfume, Aromatics Elixir, then Bait-and-Switch us with A-900. Lauder then packaged the whole deal in Pink-and-Blue and sold it to us. Whether we saw the wizard behind the curtain, or fell for the marketing, we got brilliant perfume. Given that Chant was able to make these different models by overdosage, he effectively juggled multiple strategies that never lost track of quality.

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An interesting strategy, a reverse of the norm, is The Concentration-Flanker, or the Non-Flanker Flanker. Nothing new here, in fact it's a matter of course for a Chanel perfume. If a company releases and EDP version of a perfume that had previously only been available as an EDT (plus possibly an extrait) it's not really a flanker. Is it? The jump from Guerlain Insolence EDT to the EDP wasn't just a change in concentration. It was a different approach to the same theme. Ditto for Mugler's recent Angel EDT. When you consider that Insolence was in fact an homage to l'Heure Bleue, a perfume almost 100 years old at the time, which itself was a variation of Apres l'Ondee, which is the flanker?

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Maybe intent and commitment to excellence are the issue. In fact, another strategy, the updating of a classic for a new generation (The Facelift ) demonstrates the point. Take a well-known classic, update it, release it as a flanker. This could be a grim prospect if done carelessly. But Guerlain and Chanel prove the value of the strategy with Shalamar Parfum Initial, No 5 Eau Premiere, No 19 Poudree. If well-done, the Facelift is one of the least cynical approaches to the flanker.

In some circumstances, the product release itself seems less the issue than the ongoing exploration and experimentation by the perfumer. From Femme to Ocean Rain, Edmond Roudnitska's metier was the fruity chypre. Bernard Chant made Cabochard, then Aramis, then Azurèe. Imagine what he'd have made had he worked longer! Jean Claude Ellena and Bertrand Duchaufour have created artistic movements in the perfumes that stem from their philosophies. Calice Becker and Christine Nagel have rewritten the rules for entire genres, respectively the floral and the Oriental, over the course to date of their careers.

Were these artists just producing flankers? Obviously not, and again, intent and commitment are key. Exploring a theme while setting the sights high may not always lead to success but it's doubtful you'll have success without them.

from scenthurdle.com