Isabelle Ferrand, CEO of Cinquième Sens, shares with us her vision of the world of olfaction for the years to come.
The Cinquième Sens has been in existence since 1976, and boasts forty years of experience, with many clients. Please remind us of the scope of your business…
Isabelle Ferrand: For more than four decades, we have been working hand in hand with the world of olfaction, with olfactory training, market analysis and foresight. Our expertise is no longer in question, but over the past five to six years, we have seen an increasing number of developments around the sense of smell, with the arrival of many small structures that highlight their expertise without any real legitimacy or experience. That is why we want to make our historical expertise more clearly visible: olfactory expertise in all its forms.
So it’s a return to the roots?
I.F : The raison d’être of Cinquième Sens at its founding was to be a composition house. The company was founded by Monique Schlienger, a woman who was a perfumer-creator and wanted to become independent. She was the first to make this choice. Very quickly, she added training to her perfume creation activity. Cinquième Sens quickly became recognized as a professional training institute while we have always been a perfume creation company. To re-establish our identity as a house of composition, we have been organizing creativity weeks for the last five years, during which we invite our clients and prospects to show them what we are capable of in terms of creating perfumes. Today, we want to go even further and reposition Cinquième Sens as a full-fledged composition house, with a genuine commitment to continuing to pass on to others this passion for scents that is ours.
What is your strategy?
I.F : Our new strategy can be summarized in one phase: «Speak the truth, feel the truth». The sense of smell is now at the center of all activities. If we are not careful, we can create an olfactory pollution phenomenon comparable to visual and sound pollution? When we broadcast anything, the mixtures of odors develop a sense of fear. An overstimulated sense will become impoverished. Our strategy aims to ensure that the world of hearing or sight is not overstimulated. «Speak the truth, feel the truth» is a message that shows that you should not lie to consumers. When we make our customers feel a rose essential oil, it is a real rose and not a synthetic rose. We have always done this, but we were not used to saying it. Today, we want to say it out loud. This absolute accuracy is necessary to awaken emotions properly.
You have reorganized your offering: what do you offer now?
I.F: In order to gain visibility and clarity, we have rethought our way of communicating, with the aim of better expressing the needs of our clients. We no longer want to show them what we know how to do, but rather understand their expectations in order to bring them the benefits they are looking for. To convey this new message, we completely redesigned our website last year. The reorganization of our offerings aims to meet the specific needs expected by our clients. Faced with the health crisis, we reacted very quickly by offering all our training modules remotely. We sent each participant our organ of perfumes, the olfactory, and the course sessions were conducted via video conference on Zoom. This model enabled us to train, in groups of ten, all the sales advisors at Samaritaine: each of them received 18 hours of training. This formula works very well for team building sessions in companies. We are in contact with several groups such as Capgemini and Total, and we have signed a contract with Danone to carry out creative team building activities with about sixty of their employees. For the general public, we have set up an online perfume creation workshop called «Le Nez Digital». The participant also receives an olfactorium at their home to carry out their tests and when they reach the desired result, they send us their creation, which we then produce in our laboratory.
How can you stand out even more, with enhanced creativity?
I.F: We have just launched new programs that further expand our offering in the field of perfume creation. One of our collaborators has just completed an expert training in intuitive tasting in order to implement a completely new program that we have named «Interpretation and olfactory scenography». Drawing on our experience in the world of oenology, which has enabled us to collaborate with major brands such as Louis XIII, Veuve Clicquot, Perrier-Jouët, Cointreau and Martell, we are now able to create olfactory arrangements that allow for the scenography of places and events. We also imagine for our clients their olfactory logo. This «Logolf», which translates the DNA, positioning and values of a brand, helps to increase its visibility and strengthen the emotional connection with its customers and employees.
