Industry expert day gave me so many thing to think about part 3

To round of the day, we had Nick Gilbert, who didn’t actually give a talk about idea generation and concepts. Instead he spoke (in depth) about the stories that are behind scent creation.

This isn’t something that I have previously considered with fragrance, when buying my own fragrance, I always lean towards the smell but then again doesn’t everyone but it’s be a reaction to turn over the box or look into if there is a story behind it.

So why is story telling important within the fragrance industry well …

“it’s difficult to communicate fragrance to someone outside of the industry, the language that we use isn’t descriptive enough”

This is one of the most interesting points that was made through tout the day, and comes into context within so many different areas if the consumer does not understand the language used then it is pretty much pointless. But within the fragrance industry the scent makes the fragrance that we smell but is can be hard to grasp an accurate more in depth understanding of that scent if you don’t really know what you are looking for.

More than often the story that we envisage with a scent comes from the advertising and promotional campaigns. Stories are a part of human culture so it’s only natural that we go along with these visual stories and are interpretation of them even if they aren’t exactly correct with what the perfumer intended.

As well as speaking about a number of perfumes that have a range of stories behind them he also went into detail about Guerlain and their most famous scent ‘Shaliman’.

First of all let’s look at the name, which refers to the gardens of Shaliman, which instantly (for the consumer that the brand targets) allows to understand a little bit more about the scent just from the locations of the gardens.

We then look at the history that surrounds the time when the scent was created and how this has affected the scent, in this case it was around the time when vanilla material were becoming popular along with the oriental movement – the fragrance is the French understanding/ idea on what this smelt like at the time.

Like most of the stories behind the brands perfumes its relate to a love story, but yet this is typical to most fragrances within the market.

Although Nicks lecture compared to the other two didn’t touch on idea develop it has given me more to think, such as the deeper meaning behind the concept. The pervious spoke about how research is important and development, but Nick spoke about there being a deep meaning to an idea the background story.