08.18.2005

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NATURAL SENSIBILITY

06.15.2001 "Understanding the Natural Personal Care Market: Why Consumers Buy (and Don't Buy)"

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Scent Drives Natural & Organic Body Care Trend

There has been a lot of recent press focusing on the amazing growth in the natural and organic body care category. Analysts and pundits continue to assume (incorrectly) that the biggest force driving this trend is a tightly logical aversion to chemicals in mainstream body care. While we do recognize that consumers have begun to attribute superior functional benefits to many natural and organic body care products (e.g., Avalon organics shampoo doesn't strip my hair coloring), a purely rational aversion to toxins and chemicals is not, in our opinion, the most powerful driver of this trend.

Everyday body care products offer one of the more powerful, multi-sensory user experiences in the world of CPG: aroma, texture and color all play a role in how consumers shop and use in this category. In fact, although at first it might seem to be the most trivial aspect of body care user experience, aroma stands out as the critical dimension of the body care user experience. So, the real driver in the natural and organic body care category is actually a sort of amateurish aromatherapy conducted both in retail stores through idle browsing and through trendy rotation of body care products simply to play with scent.

If you've ever wandered into a L'Occitane store, you've seen one of the more trendy orientations to body care retail around. Based on natural aromatherapy, each product gallery features a distinct scent profile across all major body care functional formats (shampoo, conditioner, skin exfoliant, etc.). Be it lavender or chamomile or lemon verbena, the olfactory experience is truly amazing for first-time visitors who revel in the notion of shopping first for an aroma and then for a function.

The distinctive olfactory journey provided by natural body care retailers represents what we feel is the key touch-point driving the natural and organic body care trend in the last two years. It is primarily a sensual trend, created by retailers who have cleverly erased the retailer-manufacturer boundary. They directly own the scent profiles they carefully construct, trademark and deliver as rich user experiences.

It's amazing it took body care so long to realize that, for years, consumers have been sniff-sampling personal care products in the aisles of grocery stores and drugstores. This has been the primary shopping criterion for a long, long time, yet mainstream brands have continued to churn out the same pungent scents year after year.

Wellness consumers today demand pleasantly smelling body care products. They rotate through scent profiles whimsically to have more fun with body care. Importantly, though, what was pleasant smelling in the 1980s simply no longer satisfies these consumers. The natural-ness of a natural scent is less about its objective origin or source than it is about wellness consumers' collective image of what a naturally occurring scent should be. It should be:

• Subtle
• Complex
• Not pungent
• Not heavy
• Not strongly fruity (i.e., berry scented)

The aromatic sweet spot that the natural and organic category has accidentally presented to consumers really focuses on the subtle natural smells of select herbs, fruits and plants. Sandalwood, for example, is a natural aroma derived from the bark of a famous Indian tree species, but it is NOT popular with wellness consumers due to its extremely heavy odor (strong enough to trigger asthma attacks in some consumers).

In sum, natural body care brand building is less about the purity of composition for mainstream wellness consumers than it is about exciting, subtle scent profiles, lingering aromatic signatures associated with "natural" body care, aromatic profiles of the brand that they can carry around with them for hours.

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