The Australian Egoiste launch
CHANEL'S L'EGOISTE LAUNCH IN AUST TRUE TO ITS NAME
By Simon Lloyd
Sep 22, 1992 – 10.00am
ON SUNDAY night, one of the most eccentric television commercials to appear on Australian screens marked the beginning of the biggest men's fragrance launching seen in this country since Estee Lauder introduced Aramis.
L'Egoiste is the first men's fragrance to come out of the renowned fashion house Chanel since Antaeus in 1983, and its appearance on store shelves yesterday was the first new perfume product from the company since Coco for women in 1986.
Chanel has paid high prices to wrestle market share away from rivals Yves Saint Laurent and Lauder, spending $1 million in advertising, public relations and point of sale, a figure best put into perspective in that this product is in the prestige niche (the cheapest item in the range, soap, retails at $27 a bar) and hence will appeal only to a limited market, 70 per cent of which will be women buying for men.
The development of L'Egoiste has been one of the most talked about marketing exercises in the global perfumery industry.
Critics say the name is arrogant, entirely inappropriate for the 1990s.
The company has been criticised for plugging the product so much that the fragrance itself could never live up to its own hype.
Chanel defends the brand name by insisting that it is tongue-in-cheek, and that "egoism" does not have the same pejorative undertones as "egotism".
In original market testing of the "spicy, woody, vanilla" fragrance in the late 1980s, it was called Bois Noire, but in keeping with Chanel's self-consciously bold marketing, something more provocative was needed.
The choice did provoke, and even Chanel referred to the name as"outrageous".
A specialist perfume writer in Paris displayed her cynicism about the product ballyhoo in France when she had lunch with Chanel's master perfumer, Jacques Polge, and art director, Jacques Helleu, (also the creators of Chanel No 5).
She tipped her complimentary bottle of the fragrance into a wine glass and suggested her hosts drink it, a gesture of rudeness which ironically so delighted Chanel (which had filmed the occasion) that the company used the video subsequently to help promote the product.
Globally, Chanel has spent undisclosed millions of dollars in a phased campaign of launches, Australia being the last major market for L'Egoiste's introduction.
Launched in France in mid-1989, it now occupies only fourth place in sales, behind Kouros, Jazz and YSL for Men.
Chanel says it is happy with this position at this stage.
The time it has taken L'Egoiste to reach Australia has been ample for Chanel to indulge in a public relations programme that has been as much remarked upon as the fragrance.
Chanel Australia's public relations manager, Harriet Ayre-Smith, spent weeks earlier this year hosting one-to-one pre-launch champagne parties for 55 specified journalists who were ferried to an enormously expensive rented apartment in Sydney's CBD by limousine for what amounted to an elaborate, but memorable, hoax.
Aside from criticism of the L'Egoiste name, Chanel has had more problems with trade mark. Outside Australia, New Zealand and Britain, the product name is "Egoiste".
Ego Pharmaceuticals, an Australian company, owns the Ego name in these three countries, and it has been part of the reasons for the delay in the Australian launch.
Chanel is negotiating, quietly confident the Egoiste name can eventually be used everywhere, but whatever the outcome it will have cost the company dearly in bottle alterations, and all sales support materials.
The extraordinary television commercial has had to be over-dubbed in these markets, and a special pack-shot had to be filmed.
The making of the TV commercial has been as much a part of the publicity as the ad itself, and deliberately.
Chanel has acquired a reputation in the advertising industry as a "brave"client, not shy of using avant-garde, even bizarre commercials to sell its classic fragrances.
The ad for Coco, for instance, features a model in black feathers swinging on a perch in a gigantic gilded birdcage, blithely emptying a bottle of the product around her, to the tune of Stormy Weather.
The same director, master of sit-up-pay-attention advertising, Jean-Paul Goude, was recruited by Jacques Helleu to create something startling for the fragrance, with a feature film budget as the incentive.
Goude took a crew, including a cast of the world's "super models", to the Brazilian scrub where he built a huge set that closely resembled the rococo frontage of the Carlton Hotel in Cannes.
Although the building was primarily just a facade supported by scaffolding, behind every shuttered window at which a model appeared a full room interior was built and decorated.
The two dozen models wore Karl Lagerfeld evening gowns, which elicited violent threats from the invaded local population.
While other advertisers might balk at the cost, daring, even folly, of such an exercise, the company maintained that its marketing was true to Coco Chanel's vision, a blend of "creativity, humour, youth, treated with elegance, refinement and a certain classicism".
"For me, (the Egoiste ad) is not a radical change of tone for Chanel," says Helleu.
"Rather, it's knowing you're strong enough to indulge in a little humour and mockery from time to time."
Television advertising also contributed largely to the delay of L'Egoiste's introduction into Australia.
The managing director of Chanel Australia, Tom Aarts, said the company was determined to use the Goude commercial, but until the ban on foreign TV ads was revoked in January this year, this was impossible.
Initially, the ad was dubbed into English by Chanel's ad agency, George Patterson, but the result was such that both agency and client took the unusual step of putting to air an ad in the original French.
(It was Chanel which first took advantage of the new rules allowing 20 per cent of advertising time for foreign ads by screening a French ad on the stroke of midnight, New Year's Eve 1991).
As part of the launching support, David Jones in Sydney is screening the ad on videos in its Elizabeth St store windows, complete with external loudspeakers pointed across at Hyde Park.
And even up to the last minute, the fragrance launch was not without incident.
Last Saturday night, police just managed to foil an attempted robbery of Chanel's entire L'Egoiste inventory.
Refrences:
Australian Financial Review
Simon lloyd