INGREDIENTS FRAGRANCE
“AI is not creative; AI is a tool,” affirms Arnaud Montet, VP of Global Human and Consumer Insights at IFF. “And, as a tool, it is there to support the creative work of the perfumers. “Their work is not only creation – it’s highly multi-dimensional,” he adds. “You’re in a very complex environment. You have to deal with regulations, you have to deal with multiple cultural needs, you have to deal with a bunch of things that really take a lot of time to be addressed and solved. And this is where AI can become not only an assistant, but a companion, and take care of all that.”
Montet believes there are three stages where AI can play a role in the process of getting a successful fragrance to market. Firstly, there is the exploration and consumer understanding phase; secondly, as mentioned, AI can be an aid during the creation stage; and, finally, it can be helpful for commercialisation and promotion.
WHAT CONSUMERS WANT
So, what technologies are being developed to better understand the fragrance needs of cosmetics consumers? Montet tells Cosmetics Business: “[IFF] leverages all techniques, including social media listening, what we call AI linguistics, or NLP, which stands for Natural Language Processing,” noting that from the “bunch of stuff on the net” there is a need to extrapolate what’s actually valuable. This same requirement influenced Givaudan to launch DigiPulse, described by Arnaud Guggenbuhl, the company’s Head of Global Marketing, Insights and Image Fine Fragrance, as a “digitally strategic way of capturing feedback from consumers’ online posts on their impressions of fragrances they’ve used or experimented with in their everyday lives”.
The AI-powered olfactive tool lets Givuadan gather instant, unfiltered consumer feedback. “Being able to access this unfiltered feedback and being able to objectify what is linked to the olfactive experience of the product versus the product experience as a whole were the major drivers that pushed us to develop DigiPulse,” Guggenbuhl explains.
“Being able to listen, identify and analyse, quantitatively and qualitatively, in vivo feedback complements our consumer and market understanding.”
While Guggenbuhl cannot reveal specifics, he says that the AI “captures and analyses the voices of consumers from a range of different social networks that have been selected to avoid fake or paid reviews, or reviews from consumers or influencers who have not been in real contact with the product itself”. DigiPulse’s proprietary algorithm is also able to uniquely focus on olfactory perceptions. “The most differentiating element of the tool is its ability to focus on the olfactive data, revealing insights on different aspects of the fragrance itself, on top of more obvious comments around
18 December 2021
packaging, marketing and advertising,” says Guggenbuhl.
“Again, I cannot reveal to you how these views are categorised, but I can say that the strength of DigiPulse is that this categorisation was not imposed by our expert point of view and language, but really came from an in-depth analysis of the real authentic, unfiltered language of consumers.” The aggregate use of DigiPulse has revealed a shift in fine fragrance towards notions of comfort, softness, happy simplicity, ‘feel good’ and ‘cuddled’, and away from the more traditional ‘seduction’ themes, he explains.
“Fragrances that help consumers to express their real, authentic selves are clearly on trend,” summarises Guggenbuhl. As for making the perfumer’s lot in life simpler, Givaudan’s DigiPulse is said to provide them with “interesting directions to explore” with the aim to tailor new fragrance creations in line with consumer desires”. Like IFF’s Montet, Guggenbuhl is keen to stress that, while AI is a useful extra, the perfumers are the real stars of the show, adding: “It’s our perfumers’ creativity that will always enhance and transform data to design [the] new classics of tomorrow.” The intel simply provides an “edge to better differentiate our creations and offer our clients better scent innovations”.
A QUICKER, SIMPLER TURNAROUND Also developed to speed up and simplify the process of obtaining fragrance is Firmenich’s Scentmate, which launched in France and Germany this summer, before expanding into the Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and UK markets in September. Explaining why he considers Scentmate to be a revolution, Álvarez-Prieto tells Cosmetics Business: “We said, ‘look, we have over 50 years of consumer insight data that is proprietary’, meaning that we have been testing consumers around the world, and we know the segments and targets very well. So, what if we offer you fragrances that are data backed?”
As an example, he points to lavender: “As an English person, you are very aware of the lavender smell,” he notes. “You smell it in gardens, you smell it when you go for a walk outside. So, if I were to propose to you a lavender that smells different, you would spot it right away.
“But, in some cultures, lavender is really not in the core DNA. So, when they think about lavender, they think about the lavender that may have come through a product that is really different from the smell of real lavender.
“Now if I create a lavender that smells like the second one and try to target it at the British market, it’s just not gonna work. But both are actually correct lavenders. “And it’s the same vice versa: if a British brand goes to certain markets, like central Europe, with a lavender that actually smells like lavender [the plant], it will not hit the nail on the head, because consumers don’t believe it.
cosmeticsbusiness.com
Scentmate is based on 50 years of consumer understanding, for example, geographical differences in what a lavender scent should smell like
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