Ralph Lauren Puts A Price Tag On Super Premium Love {Fragrance News}

Marketing Week, a UK trade journal, announced that Ralph Lauren will launch an ultra-selective perfume called Love in October 2008 at Harrods, available for the modest purchase price of £2000, or US $3515 at current conversion rate.

If at first it seems and probably does borrow the idea of amped exclusivity from Clive Christian, the man selling the most expensive fragrance in the world for $200 000, mostly for the bejeweled bottle (30 ml of the pure parfum costs only $2, 350), it adds a psychological twist to it. As one of our guest contributors, Christina Warinner, pointed out in her articles about her experience as an ex-fragrance model, women mostly seem to want to buy hope and dreams of love and a better life when buying perfume. The fragrance itself is a pretext.  Indeed it gets even more transparently interesting when we learn that the jus is aimed at young women 25 years old and more with "high spending powers"...


How about buying an insurance for love at this preferential rate (note that the marketing vultures here are not even pretending that, say, "men with high purchasing powers" will offer this perfume to their sweet Lorelies). No, Love by Ralph Lauren seems to be aimed directly at the hearts of single women suffering from anxieties over lack of love when reaching the age of 25 with too much money, career focus or leisure time, and existential angst to top it all. Who would buy such a corny perfume at such a price? It is the price tag that makes it corny. For that price range, you hope for a better, more original or less maudlin name. I don't care if an average-priced perfume is dubbed Love, because the fragrance then seems to retain its sense of humor and flash the word "love" with a playful wink, seeming to say: "who cares if it doesn't work?" or "You are not really serious about buying love, are you?" At £2000 a pop, you start thinking about marketeers, profit margins and hard-nosed business and it decidedly starts sounding unromantic and manipulative. But of course the whole point is that it will make most wince and a few smile at the plaisanterie while there will be an identification process in place: finally, a perfume called Love for my class of people. Only women who live above their means will feel the hurt of either being rejected from this promise of select happiness by Ralph Lauren, or the credit card company.

The price tag on this perfume bottle, revelatory of the neurological marketing approach counting on the high people experience in the cortex when indulging in big spending and recognizing valued brands (here, Ralph Lauren = aspirational brand + Harrods = already there + rich peer pressure in this case), coupled with a cynical sentimentalist approach is what makes the proposition veer in the direction of an indecent proposal.

Moreover, love cannot be bought and the bottle shouldn't be gold-plated: how fake and shallow. You get two wrong messages here and I think you've been had. It is a rule of thumb that high-luxury perfumes, per their prices, put a large part of their investments in the bottles, so that the jus in the end might just be only marginally better than lesser priced perfumes. In essence, what they are saying that is that your perfume will be as good as gold-plate, probably less.  

"Ralph Lauren is launching a "super premium" perfume that will cost £2,000 a bottle. Love, which will be launched in Harrods in October, comes in a gold-plated bottle.

The fragrance is aimed at women aged 25 years old and over with "high spending powers".

Antny Rankin, senior marketing and product manager at Ralph Lauren, says Love is the brand's most exclusive fragrance will have "a more engaging marketing strategy than a blanket media campaign" to support its launch."

Read more in Marketing Week...