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Issue # 11
There's a type of fragrance commercial I've seen a hundred versions of and never saw the same one twice.
A woman. Always striking. She's in something flowy and expensive, running along a shoreline, laughing, just out of reach of someone who is clearly very interested in catching her. Or she's in a gown, standing still, looking at nothing, looking like power itself. The light is golden. The setting is impossible. Nobody is doing anything that makes literal sense.
And then a name. Just the name. Maybe a logo. Fade to black.
That's it. That's the whole ad.
No list of notes. No "lasts up to 12 hours." No "now available at Sephora." Just a mood, a moment, and a word you're supposed to carry out of the room with you.
I used to watch those ads and think, ‘What did they just tell me?’
Then I realized: everything. They told me everything. Just not in any language I could point to.
Fragrance is the most honest test of what luxury actually sells.
Here's the problem with perfume, though: you can’t show it. You can’t describe it in a way that lands. "Notes of bergamot and white musk and something that smells like the idea of a forest," means nothing to someone who hasn't smelled it (or doesn’t even like the smell of the woods). The product is completely intangible until it's on your skin, in a store, or in person.
So what do you do?
You sell the feeling of the person who wears it. You sell the life they're living when they reach for it. You sell the room they walk into. You sell the version of themselves they become when they put it on.
And you do it with almost no words at all.
That's not a marketing limitation. That‘s, in fact, the whole strategy.
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Luxury figured out something the rest of marketing is still catching up to.
Silence communicates. Restraint is the signal we respond to. The absence of explanation is itself the message, and the message is: we don't need to convince you. You already know.
Think about what a luxury ad doesn't say. It doesn't say "affordable." It doesn't say "value." It doesn't say "clinically proven" or "now with 30% more" or "limited time offer." It doesn't stack claims or hedge with asterisks. It doesn't explain itself. Period.
Explaining is for things that need to justify their price. Luxury doesn't justify. It presents.
A Chanel ad doesn't tell you Chanel is prestigious. It assumes you already know, and in that assumption, makes it more true. A Rolls-Royce print ad once famously noted that at 60 miles per hour, the loudest sound in the car was the electric clock, one specific, quiet, almost absurd detail. No superlatives. No comparison to competitors. Just a single image that lets you hear the silence.
That's craft. That's language being used at its most precise, saying the least possible amount.
How Do You Sell a Smell?
The contrast is almost funny when you put them side by side.
Open your email on any given morning, and something is screaming at you. LAST CHANCE. ENDS TONIGHT. YOU LEFT SOMETHING BEHIND. The subject lines are exhausting. The ads are stacked. The copy is doing everything short of grabbing you by the collar.
Then you open a magazine, and there's a full page. A woman on a cliff somewhere in the South of France. A name in small serif type at the bottom. Nothing else.
Same medium. Completely different relationship with your attention.
That mass market ad is chasing you. The luxury ad is waiting for you. It does less work, making you feel more. Same concept as before.
That gap between the chase and the stillness is exactly where luxury lives. The restraint isn't accidental. It's the product. The silence is saying: the right people will understand this. Are you one of them?
It's an invitation with a velvet rope built into the language itself.
None of this means it's always honest.
Luxury restraint is crafted. It can also be mystification, a way of using silence to avoid accountability, to keep the price unquestioned, to make aspiration do the work that transparency would undermine.
But as a communication technique? The genuine appreciation I have for it is hard to argue away. Selling a smell with a mood and a name and almost nothing else and having it work, repeatedly, across decades, across cultures — that's not nothing.
That's a masterclass in knowing what to leave out.
Most brands could stand to learn it. The instinct is always to say more, explain more, prove more. Luxury went the other direction and built an entire language out of what it chose not to say.
The loudest thing in the room is sometimes the silence.
Until Next Wednesday,
~Aliya
Interested in how language affects your business? That’s what I’m all about. Book a free call or see how we can work together.