Puig’s CEO Knows How Brands Can Cut Through the Noise

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Today’s beauty marketers face a dilemma. To power growth, spreading the message of their brands far and wide is vital. Despite all the channels available — TikTok, Weibo, Instagram — reaching customers has never been harder. Social media can be an unfiltered and fractious space, and brands cannot always anticipate how their communications will be perceived. But Puig, which has 14 prestige brands in its portfolio and three licences, has managed to turn many of its established names like Carolina Herrera and Rabanne into contemporary hits through digital channels. It also owns new disruptor labels like Byredo, L’Artisan Parfumeur and Charlotte Tilbury that have established audiences with beauty’s next generation of customers. Chairman, chief executive and third-generation company head Marc Puig led the company through its nearly €14 billion IPO in 2024, and says that in order to propel brands forward, it’s more important to take risks than try to follow a set path.

While new competitors constantly jostle for customer attention, few become legacy names. A marketer’s role today is about honouring brand DNA instead of responding to every fleeting trend. That’s especially true in the emotionally driven fragrance category which, along with its fashion brands, accounts for 73 percent of the Puig business. “People use fragrance either because they need self-confidence or because it’s a way for them to express who they are,” said Puig.

The Business of Beauty: One of your biggest recent successes is Carolina Herrera Good Girl. The fragrance has a very distinct identity, separate from the fashion brand. How do you know when you can push marketing even further?

Marc Puig: There is this tension between the essence of the brand that we have to protect because otherwise we’ll lose the identity. At the same time, [we] need to let the brand have its own life and keep evolving. It’s like going on a bicycle; if you don’t move, you fall. It’s a delicate balance to decide what it is that makes the brand work. In this case, it’s the sophistication and the atmosphere.

The Business of Beauty: How does that play out?

MP: The typical women’s fragrance is in a cylinder [bottle] and male fragrance is a square bottle. Look at Good Girl; it’s a shoe. When we launched it, people said, ‘Does this smell like a foot? How are you going to launch a fragrance in a shoe?’ Now it’s the number one [women’s fragrance] in the world.* Look at 1 Million [a Rabanne fragrance], it’s a gold ingot. We wanted, in the crisis year [it launched in 2008], to talk to consumers in a way like, ‘Money will give you power.’ We take a different approach to communication to how we present our products at points of sale. We make mistakes like every other company. Fragrance is not predictable. It’s more difficult and you don’t know whether something will be a big success or not.

The Business of Beauty: What are some of your creative strategies?

MP: Humans are much more impacted by sight and sound than by smell. When you ask someone to smell a fragrance, they will say, ‘Uh, it’s fresh? Vanilla? Flowers?’ People don’t have a good way to articulate it. If they did, we would sell fragrances with the ingredients. We don’t. Instead, we sell a world around that fragrance, normally linked to a woman. And the best way is fashion. Most of the top fragrance lines are associated with fashion. We own many of the brands we manage, but most of the other fragrance brands [at other companies] are licensed. They’re licences of big multi-billion-dollar businesses, and those licensors also don’t want to take risks with the beauty business, because they want to protect their business.

The Business of Beauty: So, fashion is your secret weapon here?

MP: To take another example of a brand that is not associated with fashion: Penhaligon’s. It’s a 150-year-old brand. When we took a majority stake in 2015, it was just light fragrances for middle-aged men. I said, ‘Okay, well, it’s British. What can we do with this?’

And we believed there was a possibility of making this brand the best expression of Britishness with a sense of humour. We were inspired by Downton Abbey. We released a range of scents called Portraits, all characters from this imaginary family that allow you to tell stories in a way that makes fun of yourself a little bit. People respond to that.

The Business of Beauty: How do you approach modernisation?

MP: Some of our biggest successes took us a long time to develop. People say you have to be fast to market. I say, ‘Well, we’re not good at that.’ Because we try to push the envelope very far, rather than do a safe commercial proposition, we try to go very far and then check whether maybe we’re going too far. And that takes time. The big successes have been propositions that when they were launched, were breaking some moulds. In the case of Jean Paul Gaultier, we took over this [line] in 2016. Le Male and Classique were launched in the ‘90s, but we have been able to animate the brand in a way that has made it into the top 10 ranking* this past year. These are not new launches. These are existing brands that we have been able to bring up to date and make them relevant to young people today. When you do that, you create a lot of value.

The Business of Beauty: Shopping for fragrance is often as visual; which channels do you see as the most important?

MP: We have created a number of tools that really helped us interact with consumers through the digital channel. For example, we have AI-powered tools that help people identify their preferences in fragrances. Last year, 26 percent of [Puig] revenues came from digital channels, more than we had anticipated five years ago. You have to create this scenario, this theatre, that expresses why this brand is different, what’s the different point of view. We’re good at telling stories. [Marketing is] not just a picture, it’s a film and it’s about how you can create a film that keeps people engaged and that can jump and penetrate into [the] world. Another phenomenon we are seeing is the teenage boys, through TikTok, which is booming. We believe that’s a certain phenomenon that is here to stay. When people get obsessed with fragrance like that, they don’t go back.

The Business of Beauty: Influencer marketing is a space always in flux. How big a part will it play in your overall strategy?

MP: You cannot plan a social ‘pick.’ You have to create the conditions for that to happen. When it happens, make sure you’re quick enough to feed it. You can’t say, ‘my marketing plan is that I’m going to create a social frenzy.’

The Business of Beauty: Marketing spend can feel just ever-increasing. How do you budget for it?

MP: At the end of the day, we all have to justify a P&L, so there is a certain amount that you dedicate to promote your brands, and you try to make those expenses as efficient as possible, so you can do more with them. But we will try new things, whether it’s AI in digital marketing or whatever.

New brands are born all the time, but very few pass the test of time.

The Business of Beauty: There will always be new challenger brands coming in, especially in makeup and fragrance. How do you stay ahead of the noise?

MP: New brands are born all the time, but very few pass the test of time. When I look at the brands we’ve partnered with in the last few years, they were in the market for up to 20 years before we got excited about their proposition. It’s very easy to launch a new brand, because at the end of the day, it’s not that complicated to create products, and there’s third parties that can help you do that. It’s very difficult to escalate and to pass the fad of the moment. [There] has to be a reason, a point of view that is differentiated, and not all brands have that. I think there will continue to be many new brands coming up. I think that 99 percent of them will not pass the test of time, and a few, yes, will escalate and will be able to make a dent in the industry.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

* Brand rankings are from Puig’s industry sources.

This article first appeared in The State of Fashion: Beauty Volume 2, an in-depth report on the global beauty industry, co-published by BoF and McKinsey & Company.