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  • Fragrance Focus | Boy Smells Rebrand: A Cautionary Tale for Marketers

Fragrance Focus | Boy Smells Rebrand: A Cautionary Tale for Marketers

Plus: YSL’s ink-and-iris blend reflects the fragrance sector’s genderless evolution.

Author

Sophie Bruxner-Randall
April 30, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes

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Editor’s Pick 🌟

Marketing thought leadership has a tendency towards binaries. The funnel is either completely dead or very much alive. Brand marketing is either pointless or the solution to all your problems, and ChatGPT is ending 30 years of search overnight.

At Fospha, we love the measurement challenge of any new channel that offers our clients ways to reach more customers. However, Google is still very much the biggest advertising platform. Performance Max (PMAX) and Search products alone represent around 30% of our clients’ digital share of wallet.

In uncertain times, it’s more important than ever for brands to nail these core channels, so we produced the definitive best practice guide on PMAX and Paid Search. Here were our top findings:

  • ⚖️ Best performing brands allocate 55% of Google budget to PMAX and 12% to Paid Search.

  • 🏆 Brands that pair Search and PMAX with ~50% of their budgets in YouTube, Demand Gen and Paid Social see optimal results.

  • 🎨 Especially for PMAX, high-volume creative is key for AI-powered optimization.

Sector Spotlight 🎥

LUXURY CLEAN FRAGRANCE

Belnu’s clean fragrance line, created by Darcy Moore following her personal battle with cancer, sets a new benchmark for ingredient transparency and sustainable sourcing—combining upcycled materials, safe synthetics, and detailed disclosures rarely seen in the industry. Their collaboration with storied perfume houses ensures complex, mood-enhancing scents without sacrificing ethical or regulatory standards. Marketers can extract key lessons in authenticity, transparency, and consumer-centric innovation.

BRAND REINVENTION

Boy Smells’ recent rebrand, characterized by more feminine-coded packaging and scent reformulations, has been met with backlash from core consumers who view it as a shift away from the brand’s gender-neutral, queer-centric identity toward mainstream, Gen Z-focused appeal. This highlights the risks of estranging loyal audiences when attempting to broaden eCommerce reach through mass-market aesthetics. Marketers should carefully assess audience sentiment before dramatic repositioning, particularly in identity-driven categories.

BRAND EXPANSION

Drake’s Better World Fragrance House has launched its first eau de parfum, Summer Mink, targeting the prestige fragrance market with a $148 price point and an anticipated $60 million in first-year sales. This launch leverages the brand’s heritage of storytelling and experiential activations, extending its reach through Ulta Beauty’s full retail network. For marketers, Summer Mink’s integrated 360-degree campaign and curation-focused brand strategy demonstrates a clear model for building high-impact celebrity-driven product launches.

BEAUTY MARKET TRENDS

YSL Beauty’s MUSE unisex fragrance features ink, iris, and vanilla as distinctive notes, appealing to consumers seeking inclusive, nonbinary scents with a subtle sweetness and dramatic undertones. This launch reflects a broader fragrance industry shift toward gender-neutral profiles and niche scent combinations, providing marketers with opportunities to address evolving demands for personalization, inclusivity, and individualistic consumer experiences in the luxury and beauty sectors.

FRAGRANCE MARKET PERFORMANCE

Interparfums reported a 5% year-over-year net sales increase to $339 million for Q1 2025, driven by strong gains in Jimmy Choo, Coach, and Lacoste fragrances. Despite regional challenges and the loss of the Dunhill license, the company maintained guidance for $1.51 billion in sales and $5.35 EPS for 2025—key data for marketers assessing brand performance and industry resilience.

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Influencer Corner 📣

Meta Ads vs. Google Ads: Which One is Better for D2C Brands?

Meta ads excel at:
👉 Building brand awareness.
👉 Nurturing new customers with engaging content.
👉 Retargeting cold leads who didn’t convert initially.

Google ads are great for:
👉 Capturing demand when people are actively searching for solutions.
👉 Generating high-intent traffic with low CPC.
👉 Converting cold leads into paying customers quickly.

Which one should you focus on?
👉 Meta ads work best if you’re focusing on top-of-funnel and brand-building.
👉 Google ads work best when you’re ready to convert customers actively searching for your product.

Optimization Hub ⚙️

SEARCH INNOVATION

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) integrates traditional SEO with AI-focused strategies, ensuring content is both visible in classic search results and cited by AI models like ChatGPT or Perplexity. Marketers must structure content to answer specific questions, prioritize authority, and track AI-driven citations. Adapting to GEO is essential for maintaining discoverability in an AI-driven search landscape.

DISCOVERY COMMERCE INNOVATION

TikTok Shop’s newly released playbook, developed with Accenture Song, provides marketers and brands actionable frameworks for driving growth through discovery commerce, leveraging real-time creator content and robust measurement. With TikTok Shop rapidly capturing eCommerce market share, ignoring these trends risks falling behind competitors capitalizing on content-driven online retail.

INNOVATIVE PERSONALIZATION STRATEGIES

Cookieless personalization is reshaping digital marketing by requiring brands to use first-party and zero-party data, contextual targeting, and server-side solutions instead of third-party cookies, ensuring compliance with privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA. This shift enables marketers to maintain effective, consent-driven customer engagement while safeguarding user privacy. Marketers must adapt quickly to sustain relevance and trust.

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