Chanel Marketing Strategy

The Marketing Strategy Behind the Success of Chanel’s N˚5 Fragrance

INTRODUCTION

Gabriell (Coco) Chanel founded her company in 1913 in Paris, France. The main profile of the company at the beginnings was fashion design by Chanel herself from 1910 to 1971. She was a real innovator on the market. After her death Karl Lagerfeld became his successor, currently he is the mastermind behind the world-famous, top-selling luxury brand. Chanel soon expanded the product range and started to design luxury hats, clothes, fragrances, accessories and cosmetics. The ideology behind the brand is elegancy, beauty and self-respect of women; Chanel has a parallelism with personal identity embedded into luxury. This is illustrated by the current slogan of N˚5

Since pricing was strategic from the very beginning the fragrance soon became a symbol of status quo and a privilege of the upper class elite. Thus Chanel - for its aim was and is to be the brand of the most exclusive –has always used the high-price staregy . The high price strategy is maintained in accordance with the quality of the product: if something is pricey we tend to really believe that it is the best of quality available whether it’s true or false. Presently, the N˚5 fragrance is distributed in a still high but more available price as its revision of target audience includes the upper middle class. In Hungary, 100 ml of the fragrance is about 30 000 HUF what is about 100 Euro or 120 Dollars (Chanel, 2014).

THE PLACE

In distribution Chanel has always focused on the prosperous areas visited by the rich. Presently, Chanel is available in all the continents. Chanel has more than 300 boutiques all around the world the most significant figures are 70 in Europe, 94 in Asia and 128 shops in North America . Plus by the expansion of the target market to include the upper middle class many airlines distribute the fragrance.

THE

They employ the most popular models and celebrities. They are also in constant partnership with the most popular fashion magazines like Vogue, Prestige, Glamour, Elle and Elit. The marketing strategy of the N˚5 Fragrance is unchanged and was kept simple in the past 90 years. Celebrity culture proved to be successful in advertising this product: they started off in the 1950’s with Marylin Monroe with the statement: "What do I wear in bed? Why, Chanel No. 5..." (Vogue, 2011). In most of the ads featuring Monroe no text was added to the image, just the perfume placed somewhere on the site. This minimalism was kept in the decades which passed. Celebrities like Brad Pitt, Nicole Kidman and Audrey Tautu contributed to the promotion of the fragrance in the past few years – no slogans, no additional text just the idol and the perfume and its name “N˚5” (See pictures included in the