Coty has tapped Kaia Gerber as the new face of Daisy Marc Jacobs as a way of punctuating the 10-year anniversary of the fragrance franchise’s history.
Consistent with the Marc Jacobs’ beauty collection — Gerber was also named the face of Marc Jacobs Beauty — the 15-year-old model will headline Daisy’s global marketing campaign. In the advertising, shot by Alasdair McLellan, Gerber is flanked by models Sofia Mechetner and Dilia Martins photographed, appropriately, in a meadow of white daisies. McLellan, who took a documentary-style approach, shot the entire campaign on 16-mm. film.
The print, television and digital campaign kicks off in April — with an emphasis on digital. Daisy-related content will be posted on various channels online by Gerber, the Marc Jacobs brand and a handful of influencers through the end of the year to sustain momentum around the anniversary.
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“I’m aware [of social media], and I’ve become appreciative of this social realm and audience. Just the reaction to Kaia in our beauty ads — there’s an accessibility to people. I don’t know how people got to that, how they came to follow Kaia or another person and become enamored with an image,” Marc Jacobs told WWD Thursday afternoon.
“Because we live in that world, it just seems to enhance and add to that idea that when somebody feels this connection to a brand, product or fragrance, they want more.”
Simona Cattaneo, chief marketing officer of Coty Luxury, said extra, online-only content will be added to the conversation. She maintained this is “not going to be the classic, one week communication [strategy].”
For her, the biggest shift the fragrance industry — and beauty as a whole — has experienced over the past 10 years is the explosion and embracing of digital. As a result of this, the brand created an “unbelievable amount of content” to support Gerber’s campaign and the anniversary, strategically rolling out on various digital and social platforms from April to Christmas to extend the conversation.
“We’ll add additional content like different points of view of the girls or Polaroids or showing different moments [from behind the scenes]. Again, to keep this conversation going…not have a classic one week communication [strategy],” Cattaneo said.
A Daisy Marc Jacobs limited edition was also created for the anniversary, which hits counters the same time the ad campaign is released. Differences from the original only extend to packaging, with the fragrance housed in entirely white packaging from glass in a shiny white finish to an oversize white cap. The limited edition is affixed with the same blooming daisies as the original. Olfactively, the scent — with top notes of berries and violets, a heart of jasmine and a base of sandalwood — will remain the same. It will be sold in the fragrance’s 25,000 points of distribution worldwide, hitting counters in the U.S. April 5 and rolling out globally in May.
“I think the continued success of Daisy is that we tapped into something that people feel a connection to and appreciate that spirit….The success is very much about being true to that original thought and identity. It hasn’t morphed [or] changed. It’s more about expressing the continued…freshness, spirit and lightness and naivety of daisy,” Jacobs said.
He added: “No one better understands the essence of what we did than me. It’s being an artistic guard of this character and essence and spirit we’ve created.”
Daisy is a top 10 selling fragrance globally and within the top five in the U.S. and U.K., according to Coty, the licensee of Marc Jacobs fragrances, with one bottle sold every 15 seconds. The fragrance has a global distribution of about 25,000 points of sale. Coty declined to comment on sales figures or growth projections.