Dennis Keogh,
Senior Vice President of U.S. Marketing
Coty Prestige

Jennifer Lopez, Kenneth Cole, Calvin Klein, and Vera Wang are just some of the top-selling celebrity and designer scents in the Coty Prestige family. In early 2006, Coty, Inc., the world’s largest fragrance company and a leader in the color cosmetics market, created this division because they wanted to become a top-five global beauty company at the heart of the prestige market.

Part of the company’s strategy for achieving that goal, explained Coty Prestige Senior Vice President of U.S. Marketing, Dennis Keogh, is thoroughly understanding the marketplace before critical decisions are made. That’s where NPD information and insights come in.

“NPD’s information has revolutionized our ability to view the marketplace,” he said. “For years, the industry had no reliable information to go on – we had to piece together data and use guesswork to determine how the marketplace was doing. The data has totally changed the way we analyze the category and conduct business.”

Coty Prestige counts NPD’s BeautyTrends retail tracking service and FragranceTrack consumer tracking service among its critical tools for smart decision-making. It’s used in many functional areas across the company to “dive deeper into our brand equity, to explore consumer awareness within specific demographic breaks, and to uncover strengths of our brands and opportunities where we can be more aggressive,” Keogh said. His marketing team relies on the weekly, monthly, and year-to-date sales tracking for important perspective on new launches and the productivity of products in a range. They also use it to “speak more intelligently to retailers about the overall competitive landscape.”

Recently, Coty Prestige relaunched Davidoff’s Cool Water, the fragrance considered the cornerstone of the original Coty Prestige company. “After 15 years at the fragrance counter, the Cool Water brand was eroding a bit. We used NPD information to understand what was happening – who the real target was and is, and how to address brand equity. We were able to identify what was appealing and what was weaker about this brand,” said Keogh. The result of this extensive review of the data was an all-new advertising creative, a new media focus, stronger direction for promotional packaging, and a decision to make the Cool Water brand less gift-with-purchase driven.

Dennis Keogh shared his perspective on NPD’s role in this fragrance brand’s new life: “We have achieved tremendous success as a result of the Cool Water relaunch. Since then, NPD has given us a clear picture of the renewed vitality of this brand.”

When reflecting on the role NPD plays in managing Coty’s business, Keogh described the customer service and general interest in their business as being “unlike that of any other marketing information supplier with which we deal. The culture is extremely service-oriented and eager to provide what we need at any point, even if it’s not part of the standard package. That really adds value to our relationship.”

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