Baccarat Rouge 540 exhibition: Key takeaways
- Maison Francis Kurkdjian translates Baccarat Rouge 540 into music, chocolate and kinetic glass art, giving visitors several ways to encounter the fragrance
- Shanghai marks the exhibition’s first stop outside France, following its Paris debut
- The format could help consumers describe and remember a scent while providing visual material for online storytelling
What does a perfume sound like? Or taste like? Maison Francis Kurkdjian (梵诗柯香) is exploring these questions with an exhibition at Shanghai’s Xintiandi. Sensory Alchemy is the name. It interprets the brand fragrance Baccarat Rouge 540 through music, chocolate and moving glass sculptures.
Shanghai is the exhibition’s first international stop following its Paris debut. The project brings together five artists, offering visitors different ways to encounter a fragrance usually experienced through a bottle or a scented testing strip.
The project brings together five artists, offering visitors different ways to encounter a fragrance
Music translates the perfume into sound, while chocolate offers an interpretation through taste. Moving glass sculptures give it a visual presence. These various elements work together in a way that’s supposed invite visitors to consider how one fragrance might take shape across several senses.
For the fragrance house, the format creates room for a longer conversation around a single product. At a beauty counter, a customer might spend a few moments sampling a scent. An exhibition gives that scent a setting, a sequence of encounters and several possible associations to carry away.
It also supplies a visual language for a category that can be difficult to communicate on screen. A perfume’s smell cannot travel through a photograph, but its artistic interpretations can give audiences something concrete to look at and discuss.
The Dao view: Beyond the nose
The Shanghai exhibition turns Baccarat Rouge 540 into a destination as well as a fragrance. Its marketing potential comes from keeping the perfume at the centre of each artistic encounter: sound, taste and movement offer different routes back to the same product.
The Shanghai exhibition turns Baccarat Rouge 540 into a destination as well as a fragrance
It’s a good bit of experiential marketing. Have you ever tried to describe a scent? It’s not easy. This type of exhibition gives consumers’ understanding of a scent through experiences they can describe and remember. It may be a little abstract, but it’s certainly memorable.
