Parfums Cacharel De L'oreal

Parfums Cacharel de L’Oreal

1. What is Cacharel’s brand identity? What are its conceptual and tangible components? Can you summarize it in less than five words?

A brand’s identity are the ideas, personality, values and beliefs that it is based on. It is how the brand aspires its consumers to think of it. While tangible components of a brand’s identity are its name, logo, signature colors, tag line etc., its conceptual components such as the vision of the founder, feelings, sentiments and values, form its underlying basis.

A strong brand identity created by maintaining a balance between the tangible and conceptual components can set a brand apart from its customers, build consumer base and have financial returns.

Cacharel’s brand identity was to provide the female youth an element of “‘tender’ but ‘sexy’” and “‘prestigious’ but ‘innovative’” while being able to promote the idea of internal satisfaction upon usage.

2. Do you think the Cacharel umbrella brand itself has an identity beyond that of its sub-brands? Which sub-brands are mostly responsible for creating Cacharel’s identity?

While Cacharel’s sub-brands were each based on their individual sets of beliefs, they significantly contributed to create Cacharel’s identity in the eyes of its consumer.

Cacharel’s most popular, the “delicate and ultra-feminine” sub-brand, Anaïs Anaïs, provided a sense of elegance to its consumers. Due to its cost-effective pricing (30% below classic brands) and larger distribution when compared luxury brands, it also permitted itself to lay in the hands of widespread female youth.  

Cacharel’s “follow-up”, Lou Lou, an evolving version of Anaïs Anaïs, was a fragrance that was launched to make a woman aware of her “seductive power”. It’s bottle and packaging was created by keeping the idea of “mixed innocence and sensuality” in mind.

Although varied from one another, Lou Lou and Anaïs Anaïs contributed most to Cacharel’s overall brand identity.

3. In your opinion, what is the root source of Cacharel’s maturity crisis?

Cacharel as a brand was founded on the principles of creativity. It’s sub brands, Anaïs Anaïs and Lou Lou proved to be in harmony with this ideology but the sub-brands launched after them deviated from it.

While Anaïs Anaïs and Lou Lou each had their respective distinctive features, they contributed immensely in unity to the brand image of Cacharel.

Rather than staying true to the identity created in the 1980’s, Cacharel succumbed to the pressure created by Calvin Klein and launched Eden, a fragrance whose brand identity varied from the one created by its predecessors. While Cacharel looked into taking forward the theme of seductive power initially started by Lou Lou by launching Eden in 1994, instead of taking into account the emotions of women, Eden’s commercials featured a couple and were not in accordance with Cacharel’s brand identity.