Britney's Curious

By Nadia Mustafa


David Letterman joked that it would reek of cigarettes and bubble gum. There were hardly any glossy magazine ads or network-television spots announcing its arrival at stores near you. Introduced in the fall, it had only four months on shelves in 2004. Still, Britney Spears' Curious reigned as the No. 1 fragrance launch last year, generating sales of $36 million for Elizabeth Arden and rivaling the company's most successful debut in history, White Diamonds by Elizabeth Taylor, over a decade ago.

How did a staid, 95-year-old brand like Arden that usually appeals to older women manage to steal teenage girls away from Wet Seal and the Gap and get them to approach intimidating, pricey department-store cosmetics counters without splaying Britney's image all over traditional media? It hired Joshua Spanier. "One issue of Vogue has 60, 80, 100 pages of advertising. How can you compete?" asks the associate media director at ad agency Goodby, Silverstein & Partners. "We realized the conventional way of launching a fragrance wasn't going to work with Britney's fans."

So several weeks before the scent's launch, Spanier and his team ran a discreet banner with a photo of Britney on five websites (which, he notes, "is minuscule in marketing terms"), including bolt.com and alloy.com, asking girls to type in their cell-phone numbers and ZIP codes. "Girls' cell phones have become extensions of themselves," says Spanier. "We thought, How do we exploit the fact that girls love their cell phones, text messaging and being online?" Spanier & Co. sent the almost 30,000 girls who handed over their numbers a 45-second recorded voice mail from Britney, in which she thanked them for being a fan and filled them in on a little secret: she was working on a fragrance she was really excited about. "The whole thing was done in non-marketingspeak," says Spanier. "These girls felt like they had an inside scoop about Britney. We knew they would forward the voice mail to their friends." And they did. Some even posted the text of the message on Britney-related online message boards.

The strategy was a first for the fragrance industry. "I've never heard of anyone doing that before," says Rochelle Bloom, president of the Fragrance Foundation, a trade group. "They really stepped out and were paid back. It opened up another avenue of media contact to the consumer."

To keep the girls excited, Spanier followed up with a series of 150-character text messages "from" Britney saying things like "The guy in my new TV commercial is really hot," prompting girls to tune in to the first airing of the ad on MTV, record it and upload screen grabs to the Web. Another text message included a list of nearby stores that would be selling Curious. (Remember those ZIP codes?) "Girls were going into department stores, saying 'Can I get Britney Spears' Curious?' a month before it was available," says Spanier.

Elizabeth Arden's chief marketing officer, Ron Rolleston, says no other company had used the Internet and text messaging to such a degree. "We wanted to reach out to Britney's fans in their own space," he says. "We had such a remarkable number of hits—half a million a day at first—that we had to upgrade our server three times in three days."

In the end, with its viral effect, the campaign reached about 300,000 girls. "With new technology," says Spanier, "you can manipulate things in a very quick fashion to a very powerful effect."