ARDEN DONS A NEW IMAGE
Byline: Jenny B. Fine
NEW YORK — After 18 months of struggling to regain its footing, Elizabeth Arden is beginning the long, hard process of restoring luster to its brands.
This week marked the culmination of a year-long campaign by executives to redesign and revitalize the Arden brand, in what was called a “reimaging project.”
Product packaging has been refashioned, retail counters redesigned, advertising images overhauled and even the sales approach and appearance of in-store beauty advisers have been refined.
The aim is to create a cohesive brand image that will allow Arden effectively to compete with beauty’s Big Three in the department store arena: Estee Lauder, Clinique and Lancome.
This follows a major reorganization at headquarters, which stanched the hemorrhaging of 1994 and early 1995, when global wholesale volume dropped from roughly $1 billion to $850 million.
Arden stabilized in 1996 following the arrival of Peter W. England, the new president and chief executive officer, and finished the year with the troubled U.S. division reportedly posting mid-single-digit sales increases. When asked to make a projection for the near future, England said, “We will make our plan for this year, and next year could be a bonanza.”
After getting its balance back in 1996, the company is projecting a U.S. sales increase in the double digits.
“Last year was a springboard into the future,” said Laurence Franklin, executive vice president and general manager of the Americas region. “We finalized core strategies with respect to how we would innovate and what roles skin care, fragrance and color cosmetics would play. When we took a step back, we said, ‘We’ve got product coming down the pipeline, people in place and the marketplace is responding.’
“But when we looked at Elizabeth Arden as a brand,” he continued, “we saw that we’re really not communicating to our customer or to the consumer in a fashion that is going to set us apart from the industry, as well as take us into the next century.”
The company is looking to cure another problem that has plagued it: diversion.
“The gray market is an evil,” said England. “To do business, you must get control of your distribution, and we didn’t have control before.”
Arden is taking steps to clean up its international distribution channels. It has terminated distributors, such as one in Hong Kong, who were selling products to unauthorized markets, including the U.S. A new policy is now being enforced that states, “You keep your business inside your boundary or we fire you,” England said.
Admittedly, the problem was not caused solely by outside forces, said England, who added that the company is now pulling back some of its “key” brands from wider distribution, particularly Karl Lagerfeld for Men, Elizabeth Taylor’s White Diamonds and Arden’s Red Door.
“More and more of our distribution will be defined by the ability to provide service,” England said. “If service is not able to be provided, then you won’t find us, and in those environments where you used to find us, you don’t find as much of us. We’re not in the discount business.
“We would have been committing suicide by getting out of it [the mass market] all at once….The mass market has its role because there are other brands which have basically run their course in the prestige marketplace. There are some properties we will be pushing as much as we can, and we should be making money off of them, some of which have been around forever.”
Among those brands, England named Chloe, Taylor’s Passion and Jewel Collection, and Lagerfeld’s Photo cologne for men.
England stressed that the company is determined to keep its new generation of products out of the mass market.
These initiatives are applauded by many retailers, who report that while the Arden business is again beginning to show signs of life, it still has a way to go.
“Arden is definitely on the right road. They’ve made a great beginning in the last six months,” said Barbara Zinn Moore, senior vice president of cosmetics and fragrances at Macy’s East, who said her Arden business had low-double-digit increases last year.
“Now, they need a continuation and refinement of everything they’ve been doing to make the line understandable to beauty advisers and consumers,” she continued. “They’re on the way with treatment, and color still needs some work.”
“I’ve seen a dramatic turnaround in Arden’s trend, but we still have a lot of work to do,” agreed Deborah Mathews, divisional merchandise manager for Mercantile Corp. “They’re working very fast and furious to turn it around, but it’s a process that is going to take them a while.”
Asked what still needs to be done, Mathews said, “I want them to make a blockbuster statement on what they stand for, and I want them to have breakthrough and innovative products.”
It is just such a statement that executives have been working on, said Franklin, who noted shopping an Arden counter in the past had been like having a conversation with a multiple personality.
“When we looked at the counters from a brand-building and merchandising point of view, there were a lot of mixed messages. You never really knew which personality was going to show at a particular time on a particular day,” he continued.
The first order of business was modernizing and clarifying its strategy for each product category — skin care, cosmetics and fragrance.
Describing skin care as “the core, the backbone of the Arden business,” Franklin said Arden decided to classify its products into four core skin care categories. They are:
Modern SkinCare, targeted to women 30 and older, rather than the current median of 41. (See story, page 11.)
Ceramide, introduced in stores six years ago and now being positioned as Arden’s anti-aging brand for mature customers.
Millenium, which Franklin called “the most luxurious, the richest [brand], which is also about anti-aging” and “another complement to our anti-aging moisturizing portfolio.”
Visible Difference, currently aimed at women with dry skin, consisting of 10 facial skin care products.
The line will be expanded to include “products that satisfy particular consumer needs,” Franklin said — oily skin, for example — and is to be relaunched at the end of this year.
There will be new packaging for each of the four brands’ inner and outer components. Each will have its own color scheme. A red door, for instance, will appear on all product packaging as a reference to Arden’s Fifth Avenue salon pedigree.
“Visually and thematically, this is our symbol,” Franklin said.
Finally, to reflect its new skin care approach, the company tinkered with its print ads. The red door icon, paired with the tag line “First Name in Beauty,” will be incorporated into all product ads.
“We decided that for the visual communication, the red door needed more, and the tag line is wonderful because it speaks to our historical roots,” said Joe Spellman, executive vice president of creative services. “We ended up running the designation line over the red door, because it verbally and graphically gets the whole message across.
“Plus,” he said, “if you look really quickly, it makes the door look like the number one.”
Executives also saw the need to distinguish each brand in the minds of consumers through its print campaign.
“Each of the ranges will have different segmented postures that will reflect the marketing position of each,” said Spellman. “We have to have both a visual and verbal message that will communicate directly and emotionally to women and enable the immediate identification of ‘This brand is for me, this is for my mother.”‘
So Modern SkinCare, with its younger target audience, will feature Arden spokesmodel Amber Valletta, while in the Ceramide ads, “the product is hero,” Spellman said.
Color cosmetics are receiving a makeover, as well. Previously packaged in black boxes with gold waves, cosmetics will now come in black boxes that feature clean, white graphics and borders — and the red door.
“Our color story says that while we might not be setting ourselves up as a leading-edge fashion company, we have a very solid, dynamic fashion element to the business that balances skin care and fragrance and allows people to come to the counter for all of their beauty needs,” Franklin said.
Retailers applauded Arden’s Custom Color foundation technology, which was introduced in six stores last year and is scheduled to roll out to between 50 and 60 more this year.
“I think they are onto something with Custom Color, and while it’s quite a project to install, it’s done quite well,” said Allen Burke, divisional merchandise manager of Dayton’s, Hudson’s and Marshall Field’s. “Everybody has got to have a point of difference, and that clearly seems to be an important one for them.”
But Arden executives have taken a conservative posture with the rollout.
“It’s very expensive and needs to be smartly managed,” England said. “It’s a great way to get differentiation, but it takes a while to get there.”
Arden also is trying to turn its fragrance business around, an endeavor that began last September with the launch of the 5th Avenue women’s brand.
“That brand represented for us the right way to go about bringing a product to market,” Franklin said. “The concept is the heart of Arden, the packaging and bottle design reflect our core package directives and the advertising was well received.
“The fragrance business has always been a strength for this company, and we will continue to grow and introduce new fragrances.”
Red Door, which executives said had a global wholesale volume of $70 million last year — the U.S. accounting for over half of it — also is being repackaged and given a new ad campaign.
“We cleverly used a red door in the ad,” Joe Spellman noted with a laugh. “After much discussion and months of argument, we decided the red door was a good idea.”
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