jennifer cook n0427042 creative networks fashion communication & promotion year 1 fash10106
send to sent
welcome to sent
#senttent
destination sent tent
contents
sent launch
joining the journey
future strategies
the sent tent
‘Organic beauty is fast becoming the hot growth segment in the industry’. (Rick Ruffalo, GCM Magazine, November, 2012). Demand for organic and naturally produced beauty products is higher than ever in the UK resulting in a gap in the market in which SENT aims to fill. Consumers have never before been so conscience about the source, constituents and ethical code of the products they purchase, thus it is a perfect time for SENT to be launched, our naturally produced perfume. SENT differs from the generic liquid spray seen in most perfumes and returns to the simplistic beauty found in the creation of perfume through a solid product that is applied directly to the skin. Solid perfume has a base consistency of essential oils such as jojoba, bee’s wax and hemp oil; natural ingredients that are beneficial to the skin in terms of moisturising, age defying and irritation avoidance. (Jacqui MacNiel, escentsaromatherapy.com, July, 2010) SENT is a layering fragrance brand made up of three separate solid fragrances; Warm Embrace, Home Bound and Under the Sheets, all of which are derived from scents that evoke feelings of comfort, warmth and safety when related to certain memories. Warm Embrace has a woody, tobacco smell and echoes a metaphorical hug through scent. Home Bound is a vanilla, coconut and musky scent which emulates the memory of coming home. Finally, Under the Sheets is the top fragrance made up mostly of the essential oil ISOE. This scent is what makes the perfume deeply personal in that it reacts directly with every users skin and develops over time. This has a freshness scent echoing the comfort of clean washing.
The SENT set is priced at £50, which is to be seen as an affordable luxury to the target market. The set is packaged with an organic wooden themed book inspired box, representing stories or photograph albums of an individuals memories and past times; a journey through life. This is the essence of SENT which is projected through a celebration of individualism. The brand aims to appropriate the exclusivity of niche fragrance brands through means of low-key public endorsement and depth of concept and meaning. Targeting the 18-25 female audience, the price point is at an affordable price, lower than many of the fragrances on the niche market today as to accustom to the desired market.
introducing sent
The first stage of the SENT journey is for potential consumers to learn about the brand and encourage them to immerse themselves in the depths of our core concepts and values. We wish our consumers to personalise our scent, to always make it their own and challenge consumers to take our product to conceptual places that are unique to the individual, thus identifying with the perfume and forming a personal relationship with it. Our launch will take place at the existing ‘Green Man Festival’ held in the Black Mountains of Wales, UK. The key principals of the festival align with many of our brand’s core values, including a step away from the norm, not conforming to mainstream ideals but diversifying as to identify with a more specific audience, thus creating an identity in itself. We feel our ideal consumers are likely to be inclined towards this type of festival, where individualism and sentimental idealism is celebrated. The setup of our launch will be discussed with specificity later, but first our marketing strategy, as means of enticing potential consumers to attend our launch, will be defined. Firstly, we will work closely with the Green Man festival, utilising their vast customer network through their website, therefore creating a platform with an existing following. This is suitable for SENT as our core demographic is likely to fall within those who attend the Green Man Festival. The introduction process will begin with The Green Man Festival opening a SENT feed on their forum, allowing us to directly communicate with potential consumers whilst concurrently creating a buzz for SENT and its new product. This trade and consumer integration will be enhanced through a competition, which can be accessed through a link posted on the forum. The link will take the viewer to a video produced by Vimeo. This video will be among one of the most essential marketing tools, as it will communicate with the consumer interactively and visually for a range of purposes. Initially the video will give an insight into the soul of our brand, discussing our core values and the concepts that have come to define SENT. Secondly, and most importantly, the video will define how the consumer can enter the SENT competition whilst simultaneously exciting the viewer with the fresh take on individualism that our brand represents. The brand aims to transport the consumer, to connect memories with the scents that we identify with, thus our competition is called ‘Send to SENT’, a personification of SENT’s core ideals. The video will explain that entry into the competition will entitle the entrant to a chance of joining the ‘journey’; we will challenge the participants to submit a personal account of significant occasions in their lives that are experienced vividly through the medium of scent. Our ‘Journey’ refers not only to the travelling back through personal experiences, but also to the competition itself. This will be discussed in greater detail later.
The launch of SENT will also be promoted through the ecommerce platform ‘Glossy Box’, the online distribution path for SENT. Miniature sized SENT perfumes will be distributed in every monthly ‘Glossy Box’ up until the launch as a form of sampling. These customers have the opportunity to promote SENT and its launch through posting reviews on SENT on their blogs and social media sites, in return for one of the ten free festival tickets supplied by The Green Man. There will be a link to the SENT video on the Glossy Box homepage that we will make sure is mentioned by all the bloggers in their reviews. This will act as another form of direct communication with our potential consumers; the bloggers will act as ‘connectors’ as reviewing the perfume will both inform their readers (our potential customers), and also promote the brand via word of mouth. The principle ideal for SENT’s journey to begin is through online word of mouth advertising, as it creates the conversation and begins to form a community. Moreover, it is the most trustworthy form of advertising which aligns with the brand values of honesty and reliability. (George Silverman, 2011, The Secrets of Wordof-Mouth Marketing: How to Trigger Exponential Sales Through Runaway Word of Mouth) Furthermore, we feel that the whole identity of SENT lies within the ability for our consumers to personalise with the scent. This process is twofold; firstly, SENT is a solid perfume, therefore its application involves direct contact with the skin, changing slightly with every natural skin scent. Secondly, we wish our consumers to identify with SENT on a personal level, much like the methodology utilised by Coca Cola in their current ‘Share a Coke’ campaign, where they have incorporated an emphasis on direct personalisation with their consumer and their product, in effect creating a brand community. This personalisation is something SENT looks to emulate. (www.coca-cola.com/shareacoke)
making the connection
We wish to carry the theme of direct communication with the consumer into the second stage of our journey. For SENT, the best way to achieve this is through the social media platforms Twitter and Instagram, stepping away from Facebook, which has now become a populated advertising platform where global brands target the masses and have little to no control over where their advertising is placed and who engages with it. (Nicola Kemp, marketing magazine, May, 2013) SENT is about exclusivity and direct communication with the consumer community. On Twitter, for instance, potential consumers will have to look ‘SENT’ up to view our account, as opposed to mass advertising seen on Facebook. We feel this compliments our core beliefs and allows us to market the brand appropriately. Entering the competition will take place online whereby the participants will not have to mail anything to us, and neither will they have to submit any contact information. The main platform will be through Twitter, where users can briefly explain their most significant memories and include us through the hashtag #SendToSent. By doing so, users will automatically be entered into the competition. Likewise, pictures can be sent into us via Instagram using the same hash tag. Our idea of adopting a hash tag is twofold; firstly the entries will be submitted into our competition, but also the hash tag can be looked up and will ‘trend’. Effectively, the brand is continuously promoted, but also a digital conversation is created, surrounding the brand and its upcoming launch sparking a communal buzz.
The next stage of our journey is crucial; it is where all of our potential consumers are invited to attend the launch of SENT. This process will be on-going and will take place digitally; all entries via twitter using our hash tag will receive an online invitation to the launch, in the form of a poster attached to a personal tweet tagging each consumer directly. The lucky few, who are selected, will be invited to attend our physical journey, ‘Destination SENT Tent’. These special invites will go out to 120 entrants who we deem to have taken precious time and put exceptional thought into the memories they have sent in. Ten entries will also be given free pairs of tickets to the festival as well as a place on the journey. These few free tickets mark an incentive to enter the competition if they have not previously purchased tickets to the Festival. Our journey will take place on four coaches sponsored by Volkswagen. These will be large coaches, each one designed in an organic style collaborating a reflection
of both SENT and Volkswagen. From the outside the buses will resemble the iconic VW camper vans, which, in keeping with our core beliefs, will transport the passengers both mentally and physically. We want our competitions winners to be transported to a different world, thus from the moment they set foot onto the buses they will be immersed in the physical representation of SENT. All their senses will be invigorated; touch, sight, hearing and most importantly smell. The buses will depart from four different major UK cities and all descend upon the Green Man Festival simultaneously. As a British brand targeting the UK at first, this is an engaging way of prioritising the ideal consumer. We feel that our ideal consumers, consisting of many of those who entered and won our competition, will understand the relevance and simplistic beauty in bringing our concept to life. We want our passengers to have a personal experience once inside the buses and to identify with our ideals as well as enjoy the fragrance itself.
the journey: destination sent tent
When the passengers arrive at the Festival they will immediately be escorted to our launch base, a large tepee style tent big enough to hold all 240 passengers and more. This will be named #SENTTent. We felt it important to give the launch site a physical location, as we want the refreshing and relaxing atmosphere within the tent to act as a haven for all those who visit it. When the passengers arrive at the tent they will be given a short speech congratulating them on being competition winners and thanking them for supporting SENT. The visitors will immediately notice that they have immersed themselves into the world of SENT; much like within the buses, the tent will have an organic feel to it, comprising of wooden dĂŠcor and a series of exhilarating scents and sights within it. Throughout the festival there will be SENT ambassadors talking with visitors about the brand whilst there will be stools positioned around the tent offering free miniature samples to potential customers as well as various collectables such as SENT bus key rings that represent themes of a journey. Furthermore, there will be a series of stools selling the full size SENT set in its book inspired packaging.
destination sent tent- the launch
Additionally, we will offer free WiFi within the tent, encouraging visitors to join our online community and to digitally express their feelings towards our launch through the hash tag #SentTent. A SENT playlist will be created via Spotify, which will also be available to download and share, in concordance with the festival atmosphere. Moreover, ambassadors have a chance to update the playlist during their stay in the tent, in a jukebox fashion which emphasises SENT’s aim in capturing memories via all of the senses. The playlist will include artists seen at the festival as well as aspiring new British talent from a range of musical genres. The launch aims to be more than just about a scent, but about a journey; a journey through memories that encompasses all the senses. And above all, we wish the launch, like our scent, to be personal to the individual.
As SENT is a small brand with a niche prestige, the brand aims to communicate exclusively and personally with its following. Therefore, SENT does not look to get mass coverage through PR support, as is apparent in the same way that it does not look to garner mass support and followings via online media such as Facebook. However, press coverage to make the launch worthwhile and keep the brand at pace is important. Through collaboration with the festival, and distribution with Glossy Box, bloggers and editors that wish to review summer events such as festivals, will provide digital and printed exposure about what went on. Harpers Bazaar, Sunday Times Style and British Vogue have all printed a festival section in their current May Issue proving to be an annually popular discussion point for the upcoming UK summer events. Furthermore, the one-off stylised vehicles for the SENT journey provided by Volkswagen is a large sponsorship gaining immediate attention for its creative collaboration. There are a number of reasons why SENT chose to collaborate with Volkswagen and their 60’s styled campervan. Not only do they have a cult following of its own as they symbolise themes of the hippy movement, in effect, relating to the natural production of SENT perfume, but also the sense of freedom and personifying belongings, therefore rejecting the general modern item. (Richard Yarrow, metro.co.uk, May, 2013). This is due to their attraction for reproducing a personified version of a generic product, which, is a current trend in reflection to Post- Modernist themes. Many brands are interpreting this individualism in their products. The Coca- Cola ‘Share a Coke’ campaign as mentioned earlier is a current example of this.
the brand. the ambassadors and the future
As SENT’s principle market is the UK, the launch needs to reach out to the UK based consumer. Therefore by using an event like Green Man Festival, the UK consumer is treated with priority and exclusivity celebrating British traditions through food, location and general atmosphere. Bloom London Dry Gin is a Gin brand that integrates their British traits through their marketing and PR campaigns in order to appeal to the British consumer, against competing foreign gin brands. In July 2012, they held a ‘pick your own’ strawberries campaign to launch a new gin. They hired a London based PR company, LDR London, to help create the event.
The launch consisted of a pop up in Soho, London, where over 3 days, 1,233 samples of a new Gin with a strawberry twist was experienced by customers who entered the pop up and picked their own strawberries for their gin infused cocktail. (ldrlondon. com). This is an example of a one off, interactive brand experience where integration with the primary market is significant. (Staff Writer, thedrum.co.uk,July 2012).
PR companies such as The ZeitGeist Agency, CypherPR and Lineupmedia are all UK based PR agencies that work with brands that connect via festivals, music promotion and art and culture events. All of which would be suitable agencies to work with SENT and The Green Man Festival to display the launch. PR agencies succeed in capturing the essence of an idea and clarifying it to the consumer in an exciting and brand related way. These PR agencies would assist the brand in providing an innovative process for the consumer highlighting the SENT journey and creatively publicising the launch.
To conclude SENT aims to revive perfume through application, natural production and brand concept. SENT is conceptually driven, and as such, the SENT journey is never ending. Throughout its launch we invited consumers to join our journey, an invite we will continue to extend throughout the brand’s lifetime. Unlike many brands, our relationship with the consumer is interactive; we create an online community where the SENT experience can be cherished, as well as the perfume itself. We aim to revive the way we as an industry communicate with the consumer through fragrance, which is personified by the moment the solid perfume touches the skins, right through to our digital community and innovative communication techniques. We as a brand celebrate individualism and encourage the development of personal relationships with our product, as we continuously strive to create more than just a perfume, but an experience.
the journey continues.......