Oct 3, 2026
How We Created Turkey’s Best-Selling Perfume
Seeing in the field what Kotler couldn’t: culture, field theory, total attack and a growth case that reached 520,000 end-consumer sales in three months. The clearest field proof of the Akdağ Doctrine.
Case Analysis
Perfume
Growth
Growth from the Field
Data told me how many units the product sold yesterday. Culture showed me how many it could sell tomorrow.®
When we created the best-selling perfume in the history of Turkish perfume retail, we didn’t have a star product. Quite the opposite.
There was a product in the portfolio with some sales volume — not entirely dead, but nobody saw it as the locomotive of the future. It sold a certain number of units every month; in other words, it had a small but organic response from consumers. Yet through the lens of classical portfolio management, that response didn’t look strong enough.
The decision for such a product is very familiar: Low shelf productivity. Limited volume. Make room for faster-moving SKUs. Shrink the product. Maybe delist it. On paper, all of this would look rational.
But what caught my attention wasn’t that the product sold little. It was that it was still selling without any special support. Because sometimes a small sales figure is not a sign of failure but of demand that hasn’t yet been unlocked. And in my view, one of a marketer’s most important jobs is to see what data can’t yet say, as much as reading what it does say.
That is exactly how this case began.
If Kotler Had Been My Guide, This Product Might Not Exist Today
My objection to Kotler here is not that the theory is entirely wrong. It is that classical Kotlerian marketing management assumes the world is too orderly, too measurable and too manageable.
Look at current sales. Define the segment. Choose the target market. Position the product. Set the price. Build distribution. Communicate. Measure. Optimise. This system is powerful. But it has a dangerous blind spot: it tries to read unrealised potential from realised data.
If I had looked at the sales report in front of me that day, I would have seen an ordinary SKU. Before the sales report, I looked at other things.
I looked at the bottle. How the product felt in the hand. Perfume habits in Turkey. The aesthetic codes of products in consumers’ bathrooms, bags and desks. How the “premium” perception of B2, C and D consumer groups is formed. How much they were willing to pay for a perfume. Which product looks expensive and which feels cheap. When a product becomes giftable.
And finally I reached a different conclusion: The problem wasn’t the product. The problem was the system of meaning the product sat in. That distinction would later turn into 520,000 units of end-consumer sales in three months.
The Product Wasn’t Bad. It Was Being Misread.
From a portfolio management perspective, the product was like a “cash cow” producing a certain volume. It sold on its own. It didn’t explode. But it didn’t die either.
I think this is exactly the signal most companies miss. If a product has been selling for years without dedicated support, the first question shouldn’t be “Why are we still keeping this?” It should be: “Why are people still buying this?”
These two questions make you look at the same product with completely different eyes. The first is SKU management. The second is consumer behaviour. I followed the second question.
What did customers love? The scent? The bottle? The price? That it looked premium? How it felt to carry? That it was giftable? That it was accessible? That they could buy the symbol of a slightly higher life at an affordable price?
All the answers led to the same place: the product’s cultural resonance was bigger than its sales figure.
Accessible Desire
The problem wasn’t the product. The problem was the system of meaning it sat in.®
The Bottle Was Telling Us Something
In the perfume industry, the bottle is not just packaging. It is the product’s first communication tool. Consumers see it before they try the scent. They pick it up. They feel its weight. They imagine how it will look on their shelf. They think about the impression it will create when given as a gift.
The bottle of our product fit Turkish perfume culture. It looked premium but didn’t use an alienating language of luxury. It was showable. Carryable. Giftable.
It sat on an important psychological balance sought by the broad B2-C-D consumer base: a product I can afford that doesn’t look cheap. That, I believe, was the product’s real potential. The sales report didn’t say it. The bottle said it. Consumer behaviour said it. Culture said it.
We Didn’t Lower the Price; We Put It in the Right Place
Creating a mass product is often wrongly understood as “making it cheap”. But price is not only an economic decision. Especially in categories with strong symbolic consumption, like perfume, price is also a message.
Go too low and you kill desire. Go too high and you kill access. The right point lies between the two.
We didn’t make the product “cheap”. We set the right distance between the product’s perceived value and the target consumer’s willingness to pay. Looking at the product, consumers had to feel two things at once: “I can buy this.” and “This doesn’t look cheap.”
Today I call this accessible desire. It is one of the most powerful spaces for mass growth.
Kotler’s Segmentation Wasn’t Enough; We Had to Read the Consumer’s Culture
Classical marketing segmentations can be necessary. Age. Income. Gender. Location. Socioeconomic group. But these don’t define consumers. They only classify them.
When you think about perfume use in Turkey, there is no such person as just a “B2-C-D consumer”. There is a person. They want to smell good. To be liked. To look well-groomed. To reward themselves. To get positive reactions when they use a product. To feel premium. But they don’t want to pay a price they can’t afford.
For them, perfume is not just a scent. It is a bit of status. A bit of confidence. A bit of visibility. A bit of identity.
That is why I don’t start marketing only from segments. I start from culture. That is exactly what I mean in the Akdağ Doctrine by “culture comes before data”. Data told me how many units the product sold yesterday. Culture showed me how many it could sell tomorrow. The difference was 520,000 units in three months.
We Didn’t Market the Product. We Marketed Desire.
What grew this product wasn’t technical messages such as “It has these notes”, “It lasts this long”, “It contains these ingredients”. All of that may be necessary as product information. But it doesn’t create demand for 520,000 units. You need to understand the feeling people want to live through the product.
We built something bigger than the product’s technical features: desire. The product became visible. Wanted. Talked about. Socially validated. Tried. Shared. Searched for. Asked about. And it started being bought.
Here is the second big point where I depart from classical marketing logic. The Kotlerian model often moves from product → segment → communication. My approach in the field works from culture → person → desire → product. You can use the same tools. But when your starting point changes, the resulting strategy changes completely.
Total Attack
Then We Went on a Total Attack
Seeing potential isn’t enough. You have to scale it. We didn’t leave marketing alone; the whole company attacked the same goal.
This is where the real work began. Today I call it Total Attack Marketing. It resembles the logic of Total Football. In total football, attacking isn’t only the striker’s job. The full-back pushes up. The midfield runs. The winger opens space. The centre-back shortens the team. The goalkeeper plays the first pass. Players take on different roles but play the same game.
TV: Taking the Product from a Small Campaign to a Mass Event
TV’s job wasn’t just reach. Digital media splits people into micro-clusters. TV is still one of the few tools that can create shared awareness across very large audiences at the same time.
Our goal wasn’t to be able to say “we have a TV ad”. It was to take the product from being a small item seen online and make it part of a mass cultural event. TV created the first big wave. But that wave wasn’t left on its own.
Outdoor: Turning the City into a Media Space
Then the product became visible in the physical world too. Outdoor isn’t just billboards. Used correctly, the city is the brand’s ongoing commercial. Main arteries. Heavy traffic routes. Areas around malls. Store locations. Consumers’ daily movement zones.
A few hours after seeing it online, consumers met the product again in the physical world. This repetition creates a powerful psychological effect: “This product is everywhere.” And after a while, “everywhere” turns into “so it must be widely preferred”. Perceived popularity starts feeding real popularity.
Social Media: Not a Communication Channel, but a Demand Engine
Our goal on social media was never to fill a content calendar. Nor was it follower count. The goal was to build a system that made people see, talk, get curious, search, go to the store, try and buy.
During this period, social media performance grew by roughly 400%. Monthly reach hit 60–100 million in some periods. But reading these figures only as social media success would be a mistake. Because the real chain was:
Visibility → Curiosity → Search → Trial → Purchase → Sharing → New Visibility
A purchase created new content. New content created new searches. New searches turned into store or e-commerce traffic. The system began to feed itself.
Influencers: Not Code Distributors, but Cultural Carriers
In influencer marketing, we didn’t get stuck in last-click logic either. Not every influencer plays the same role. Some create reach. Some trust. Some social proof. Some direct sales. Some take the product into a community you couldn’t reach before. Some make consumers feel “this product belongs to my world”.
We built scale with large accounts, trust with mid-sized creators, community penetration with micro-influencers and social proof with user-generated content. This is where the difference emerged between a brand talking about its product and people talking about it. The first is advertising. The second is cultural diffusion.
Content: Not a Single Ad Film, but a Continuous Story Flow
Shooting one hero film and running the same creative for months wasn’t enough. The product had to appear again and again in different contexts. Hero video. Short videos. Reels. TikTok. Product close-ups. Lifestyle shoots. Influencer content. UGC. Store videos. Gift scenarios. Usage rituals. Reaction content. Creatives telling the world of the scent. Trend content.
The goal wasn’t to repeat the same message. It was to keep re-creating the same desire in different cultural contexts.
Performance Marketing: It Didn’t Create Demand; It Captured the Demand We Created
Performance marketing mattered. But it wasn’t the centre of the system. Because performance marketing is usually better at capturing existing demand than creating it. We grew demand first. Then we turned it into sales through Meta, Google and other digital systems.
Over time my formula became very clear: Brand creates demand. Performance captures demand. Retail converts demand. CRM compounds demand.
When you separate these four steps, marketing departments optimise their own KPIs. When you connect them, the company grows.
Google: From Showing Ads to Being Searched For
One of the real indicators of a brand’s strength is not how many ads it shows customers. It is customers starting to search for the brand on their own. They saw it on TV. Met it again outdoors. Saw content on Instagram. Heard about it from an influencer. Then they went to Google and searched for it themselves.
At this point advertising stops chasing demand. The consumer starts chasing the brand. That was one of the most important shifts for us.
Marketplaces: Not a Sales Channel, but a Digital Shelf
We didn’t see marketplace strategy as mere distribution either. The marketplace is the digital shelf of modern retail. Search ranking. Product image. Title. Reviews. Rating. Stock. Price. Delivery. Promotion. Product content. All of these shape the consumer’s perception of the brand.
If consumers see the product on TV, come to the marketplace and find a weak product card, you lose millions in media investment in the last metre. So the digital shelf had to be part of the attack too.
E-Commerce: The Conversion Point Where the Whole System Delivers Demand
In the same period, e-commerce grew by roughly 500%. But I didn’t read this only as the website’s success. Because the website didn’t grow on its own. TV grew it. Social media grew it. Influencers grew it. Google grew it. The store network built trust. CRM brought customers back. Marketplaces widened visibility. Product demand fed the system.
Customers saw the product on Instagram one day, smelled it in a store the next, searched for it on Google in the evening, then bought it from the website or a marketplace. That is why I never found the split between “online customer” and “offline customer” sufficient. The customer is one. Channels change.
Selling the Shelf
We Used Stores Not as Points of Sale, but as a Media Network
We had a physical network of hundreds of stores. Seeing it only as a distribution advantage would have been a big mistake. A store is also media. The window is media. The tester is media. The shelf is media. The in-store screen is media. The bag is media. The sales consultant is media. The checkout is media. The scent experience itself is media.
We turned the desire created online into a real experience in the physical world. Consumers no longer just saw the product on a screen. They touched it. Smelled it. Tried it. And decided.
Visual Merchandising: The Shelf Is Not a Democracy
Giving every SKU equal space isn’t good merchandising. Because not every product has the same commercial job. If the hero product is going to generate traffic, it has to behave like a hero in the store too. Window. Facing. Testers. Product height. Visual support. Link to checkout. Sales consultant priority.
The product’s entire in-store visibility must be rethought according to its strategic role. When demand created by marketing walks into a store and can’t find the product, or the product gets lost on the shelf, a large part of the advertising budget is wasted.
The Sales Consultant: Marketing’s Last Metre
In my view, the most underrated medium in marketing is the sales consultant. You show ads to millions of people. The customer comes to the store. Who is in front of them a few seconds before the purchase decision? The sales consultant.
If they don’t know the product, you’ve lost. If they can’t tell the right story, you’ve lost. If they can’t read the customer’s need, you’ve lost. If they can’t connect an alternative, you’ve lost. If they can’t cross-sell, you’ve lost again.
That is why store staff weren’t at the end of the campaign. They were at the centre of the system. Because the hero product’s job wasn’t to be the last product the customer bought. It was to be the first.
Why the Hero Product’s Real Success Showed Outside Itself
This is the most valuable part of the case for me. The hero product sold extraordinarily well. But if it had only sold itself, I would have counted it as a successful product launch. What we created was bigger.
Customers came to the store to ask for the product. They tried other scents. The sales consultant suggested new products. The basket widened. Category penetration rose. Customers met the brand for the first time. And demand for the hero product started flowing to the rest of the shelf. The perfume didn’t just sell itself. It sold the shelf.
Unit sales in the niche perfume category grew by roughly 100%, and the category came to generate about 35% of total revenue. On the creation side, unit sales rose by roughly 120%; this area also became one of the core commercial engines, generating about 35% of total revenue.
That is what success means to me. Not a product growing its own P&L. But changing the economic performance of the rest of the company.
Bourdieu: A Product Doesn’t Carry Value on Its Own
Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory lets me describe this case better years later. An actor’s value doesn’t come only from its own features. It is produced by the field it sits in, its relationships, positions and different forms of capital.
The perfume wasn’t alone either. The bottle carried symbolic value. The price provided accessibility. TV created mass visibility. Influencers created social capital. Social media accelerated cultural circulation. Stores provided physical legitimacy. Sales volume turned into social proof. Marketplaces built trust. Sales consultants gave the product a human context. Each increased the value of the others.
That is why I don’t define what we did then as merely 360-degree marketing. We organised a field. And the product became an ever-stronger centre of gravity within it.
520,000 Yeses
Total Football: Everyone Attacks, but Not Everyone Is a Striker
In total football the team moves as a whole. But that doesn’t mean everyone does the same job. The goalkeeper isn’t a striker. The centre-back isn’t a winger. The midfielder isn’t a centre-forward. But when the attack begins, everyone is part of it.
The same applies in companies. An influencer isn’t a sales consultant. TV isn’t a performance ad. Outdoor isn’t CRM. A store isn’t social media. E-commerce isn’t physical retail. But all serve the same commercial result. A true 360-degree approach means every channel doing its own job while also lifting the performance of the others.
And a Team Is Only as Strong as Its Weakest Muscle
You can shoot the best ad in the world; if there’s no stock, you lose. You can reach 60 million people; if store conversion is poor, you lose. Your product can be perfect; if nobody knows about it, you lose. Your influencer campaign can go viral; if your marketplace product card is weak, you lose. You can persuade a customer to buy once; if CRM can’t bring them back, you have to buy customers again. You can make demand explode; if supply can’t carry it, success turns into crisis.
That is why a company’s real growth capacity isn’t the performance of its strongest department. It is the performance its weakest muscle allows. When I look at a company today, one of the first questions I ask is: Where is growth’s weakest muscle?
Because sometimes improving marketing doesn’t require more marketing. It requires fixing supply. Sometimes you don’t need more traffic. You need to fix conversion. Sometimes you don’t need new customers. You need to fix retention. Sometimes you don’t need a new product. You need to change the meaning of the existing one. That is exactly what happened in our case.
The Result: Not 520,000 Units, but 520,000 Purchase Decisions
In three months: 520,000 units of end-consumer sales. This number isn’t product leaving the factory, shipments to distributors, invoices to dealers or boxes sent to warehouses. It is real retail sell-out to consumers. Moreover, these 520,000 units exclude international B2B, distributor and dealer sales; with international channels added, the total commercial volume the product generated was far larger.
A daily average of 6,500 units of end-consumer sales; on some days more than 10,000 units of sell-out. That is why I don’t see 520,000 units merely as sales volume. I see 520,000 separate consumer purchase decisions. 520,000 “yeses” given at the checkout.
And those 520,000 “yeses” didn’t only grow the hero product. Niche perfume units grew by roughly 100% and creation units by roughly 120%. Social media grew by roughly 400%, monthly reach hit 60–100 million in some periods, and e-commerce grew by roughly 500%. The traffic, desire and visibility created by the hero product spread across the entire brand.
What If Kotler Had Been My Guide?
If I had relied only on past data, I would have had current sales, SKU performance, shelf productivity, segmentation, benchmarks and portfolio analysis. And all of this could have led to a decision that looked entirely rational: this product isn’t strong enough. Shelf space could have been cut. Investment could have been stopped. Maybe it would have been delisted. And the best-selling perfume in the history of Turkish perfume retail would never have existed.
Theory is powerful at explaining what happened in the past. The field sometimes lets you see what hasn’t happened yet. Sometimes marketing is the work of noticing potential nobody else can see yet and turning it into real demand.
The formula I drew from this case is still the same today: Read the culture. Know the consumer. See the signal inside behaviour. Discover desire. Place the product in the right field of meaning. Optimise the price. Organise the field. Strengthen the weakest muscle. Then attack with the whole company.
Don’t market the product. Market the meaning people want to see in it. That is how we created Turkey’s best-selling perfume.
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(Gökhan Akdağ)
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Oct 3, 2026
How We Created Turkey’s Best-Selling Perfume
Seeing in the field what Kotler couldn’t: culture, field theory, total attack and a growth case that reached 520,000 end-consumer sales in three months. The clearest field proof of the Akdağ Doctrine.
Case Analysis
Perfume
Growth
Growth from the Field
Data told me how many units the product sold yesterday. Culture showed me how many it could sell tomorrow.®
When we created the best-selling perfume in the history of Turkish perfume retail, we didn’t have a star product. Quite the opposite.
There was a product in the portfolio with some sales volume — not entirely dead, but nobody saw it as the locomotive of the future. It sold a certain number of units every month; in other words, it had a small but organic response from consumers. Yet through the lens of classical portfolio management, that response didn’t look strong enough.
The decision for such a product is very familiar: Low shelf productivity. Limited volume. Make room for faster-moving SKUs. Shrink the product. Maybe delist it. On paper, all of this would look rational.
But what caught my attention wasn’t that the product sold little. It was that it was still selling without any special support. Because sometimes a small sales figure is not a sign of failure but of demand that hasn’t yet been unlocked. And in my view, one of a marketer’s most important jobs is to see what data can’t yet say, as much as reading what it does say.
That is exactly how this case began.
If Kotler Had Been My Guide, This Product Might Not Exist Today
My objection to Kotler here is not that the theory is entirely wrong. It is that classical Kotlerian marketing management assumes the world is too orderly, too measurable and too manageable.
Look at current sales. Define the segment. Choose the target market. Position the product. Set the price. Build distribution. Communicate. Measure. Optimise. This system is powerful. But it has a dangerous blind spot: it tries to read unrealised potential from realised data.
If I had looked at the sales report in front of me that day, I would have seen an ordinary SKU. Before the sales report, I looked at other things.
I looked at the bottle. How the product felt in the hand. Perfume habits in Turkey. The aesthetic codes of products in consumers’ bathrooms, bags and desks. How the “premium” perception of B2, C and D consumer groups is formed. How much they were willing to pay for a perfume. Which product looks expensive and which feels cheap. When a product becomes giftable.
And finally I reached a different conclusion: The problem wasn’t the product. The problem was the system of meaning the product sat in. That distinction would later turn into 520,000 units of end-consumer sales in three months.
The Product Wasn’t Bad. It Was Being Misread.
From a portfolio management perspective, the product was like a “cash cow” producing a certain volume. It sold on its own. It didn’t explode. But it didn’t die either.
I think this is exactly the signal most companies miss. If a product has been selling for years without dedicated support, the first question shouldn’t be “Why are we still keeping this?” It should be: “Why are people still buying this?”
These two questions make you look at the same product with completely different eyes. The first is SKU management. The second is consumer behaviour. I followed the second question.
What did customers love? The scent? The bottle? The price? That it looked premium? How it felt to carry? That it was giftable? That it was accessible? That they could buy the symbol of a slightly higher life at an affordable price?
All the answers led to the same place: the product’s cultural resonance was bigger than its sales figure.
Accessible Desire
The problem wasn’t the product. The problem was the system of meaning it sat in.®
The Bottle Was Telling Us Something
In the perfume industry, the bottle is not just packaging. It is the product’s first communication tool. Consumers see it before they try the scent. They pick it up. They feel its weight. They imagine how it will look on their shelf. They think about the impression it will create when given as a gift.
The bottle of our product fit Turkish perfume culture. It looked premium but didn’t use an alienating language of luxury. It was showable. Carryable. Giftable.
It sat on an important psychological balance sought by the broad B2-C-D consumer base: a product I can afford that doesn’t look cheap. That, I believe, was the product’s real potential. The sales report didn’t say it. The bottle said it. Consumer behaviour said it. Culture said it.
We Didn’t Lower the Price; We Put It in the Right Place
Creating a mass product is often wrongly understood as “making it cheap”. But price is not only an economic decision. Especially in categories with strong symbolic consumption, like perfume, price is also a message.
Go too low and you kill desire. Go too high and you kill access. The right point lies between the two.
We didn’t make the product “cheap”. We set the right distance between the product’s perceived value and the target consumer’s willingness to pay. Looking at the product, consumers had to feel two things at once: “I can buy this.” and “This doesn’t look cheap.”
Today I call this accessible desire. It is one of the most powerful spaces for mass growth.
Kotler’s Segmentation Wasn’t Enough; We Had to Read the Consumer’s Culture
Classical marketing segmentations can be necessary. Age. Income. Gender. Location. Socioeconomic group. But these don’t define consumers. They only classify them.
When you think about perfume use in Turkey, there is no such person as just a “B2-C-D consumer”. There is a person. They want to smell good. To be liked. To look well-groomed. To reward themselves. To get positive reactions when they use a product. To feel premium. But they don’t want to pay a price they can’t afford.
For them, perfume is not just a scent. It is a bit of status. A bit of confidence. A bit of visibility. A bit of identity.
That is why I don’t start marketing only from segments. I start from culture. That is exactly what I mean in the Akdağ Doctrine by “culture comes before data”. Data told me how many units the product sold yesterday. Culture showed me how many it could sell tomorrow. The difference was 520,000 units in three months.
We Didn’t Market the Product. We Marketed Desire.
What grew this product wasn’t technical messages such as “It has these notes”, “It lasts this long”, “It contains these ingredients”. All of that may be necessary as product information. But it doesn’t create demand for 520,000 units. You need to understand the feeling people want to live through the product.
We built something bigger than the product’s technical features: desire. The product became visible. Wanted. Talked about. Socially validated. Tried. Shared. Searched for. Asked about. And it started being bought.
Here is the second big point where I depart from classical marketing logic. The Kotlerian model often moves from product → segment → communication. My approach in the field works from culture → person → desire → product. You can use the same tools. But when your starting point changes, the resulting strategy changes completely.
Total Attack
Then We Went on a Total Attack
Seeing potential isn’t enough. You have to scale it. We didn’t leave marketing alone; the whole company attacked the same goal.
This is where the real work began. Today I call it Total Attack Marketing. It resembles the logic of Total Football. In total football, attacking isn’t only the striker’s job. The full-back pushes up. The midfield runs. The winger opens space. The centre-back shortens the team. The goalkeeper plays the first pass. Players take on different roles but play the same game.
TV: Taking the Product from a Small Campaign to a Mass Event
TV’s job wasn’t just reach. Digital media splits people into micro-clusters. TV is still one of the few tools that can create shared awareness across very large audiences at the same time.
Our goal wasn’t to be able to say “we have a TV ad”. It was to take the product from being a small item seen online and make it part of a mass cultural event. TV created the first big wave. But that wave wasn’t left on its own.
Outdoor: Turning the City into a Media Space
Then the product became visible in the physical world too. Outdoor isn’t just billboards. Used correctly, the city is the brand’s ongoing commercial. Main arteries. Heavy traffic routes. Areas around malls. Store locations. Consumers’ daily movement zones.
A few hours after seeing it online, consumers met the product again in the physical world. This repetition creates a powerful psychological effect: “This product is everywhere.” And after a while, “everywhere” turns into “so it must be widely preferred”. Perceived popularity starts feeding real popularity.
Social Media: Not a Communication Channel, but a Demand Engine
Our goal on social media was never to fill a content calendar. Nor was it follower count. The goal was to build a system that made people see, talk, get curious, search, go to the store, try and buy.
During this period, social media performance grew by roughly 400%. Monthly reach hit 60–100 million in some periods. But reading these figures only as social media success would be a mistake. Because the real chain was:
Visibility → Curiosity → Search → Trial → Purchase → Sharing → New Visibility
A purchase created new content. New content created new searches. New searches turned into store or e-commerce traffic. The system began to feed itself.
Influencers: Not Code Distributors, but Cultural Carriers
In influencer marketing, we didn’t get stuck in last-click logic either. Not every influencer plays the same role. Some create reach. Some trust. Some social proof. Some direct sales. Some take the product into a community you couldn’t reach before. Some make consumers feel “this product belongs to my world”.
We built scale with large accounts, trust with mid-sized creators, community penetration with micro-influencers and social proof with user-generated content. This is where the difference emerged between a brand talking about its product and people talking about it. The first is advertising. The second is cultural diffusion.
Content: Not a Single Ad Film, but a Continuous Story Flow
Shooting one hero film and running the same creative for months wasn’t enough. The product had to appear again and again in different contexts. Hero video. Short videos. Reels. TikTok. Product close-ups. Lifestyle shoots. Influencer content. UGC. Store videos. Gift scenarios. Usage rituals. Reaction content. Creatives telling the world of the scent. Trend content.
The goal wasn’t to repeat the same message. It was to keep re-creating the same desire in different cultural contexts.
Performance Marketing: It Didn’t Create Demand; It Captured the Demand We Created
Performance marketing mattered. But it wasn’t the centre of the system. Because performance marketing is usually better at capturing existing demand than creating it. We grew demand first. Then we turned it into sales through Meta, Google and other digital systems.
Over time my formula became very clear: Brand creates demand. Performance captures demand. Retail converts demand. CRM compounds demand.
When you separate these four steps, marketing departments optimise their own KPIs. When you connect them, the company grows.
Google: From Showing Ads to Being Searched For
One of the real indicators of a brand’s strength is not how many ads it shows customers. It is customers starting to search for the brand on their own. They saw it on TV. Met it again outdoors. Saw content on Instagram. Heard about it from an influencer. Then they went to Google and searched for it themselves.
At this point advertising stops chasing demand. The consumer starts chasing the brand. That was one of the most important shifts for us.
Marketplaces: Not a Sales Channel, but a Digital Shelf
We didn’t see marketplace strategy as mere distribution either. The marketplace is the digital shelf of modern retail. Search ranking. Product image. Title. Reviews. Rating. Stock. Price. Delivery. Promotion. Product content. All of these shape the consumer’s perception of the brand.
If consumers see the product on TV, come to the marketplace and find a weak product card, you lose millions in media investment in the last metre. So the digital shelf had to be part of the attack too.
E-Commerce: The Conversion Point Where the Whole System Delivers Demand
In the same period, e-commerce grew by roughly 500%. But I didn’t read this only as the website’s success. Because the website didn’t grow on its own. TV grew it. Social media grew it. Influencers grew it. Google grew it. The store network built trust. CRM brought customers back. Marketplaces widened visibility. Product demand fed the system.
Customers saw the product on Instagram one day, smelled it in a store the next, searched for it on Google in the evening, then bought it from the website or a marketplace. That is why I never found the split between “online customer” and “offline customer” sufficient. The customer is one. Channels change.
Selling the Shelf
We Used Stores Not as Points of Sale, but as a Media Network
We had a physical network of hundreds of stores. Seeing it only as a distribution advantage would have been a big mistake. A store is also media. The window is media. The tester is media. The shelf is media. The in-store screen is media. The bag is media. The sales consultant is media. The checkout is media. The scent experience itself is media.
We turned the desire created online into a real experience in the physical world. Consumers no longer just saw the product on a screen. They touched it. Smelled it. Tried it. And decided.
Visual Merchandising: The Shelf Is Not a Democracy
Giving every SKU equal space isn’t good merchandising. Because not every product has the same commercial job. If the hero product is going to generate traffic, it has to behave like a hero in the store too. Window. Facing. Testers. Product height. Visual support. Link to checkout. Sales consultant priority.
The product’s entire in-store visibility must be rethought according to its strategic role. When demand created by marketing walks into a store and can’t find the product, or the product gets lost on the shelf, a large part of the advertising budget is wasted.
The Sales Consultant: Marketing’s Last Metre
In my view, the most underrated medium in marketing is the sales consultant. You show ads to millions of people. The customer comes to the store. Who is in front of them a few seconds before the purchase decision? The sales consultant.
If they don’t know the product, you’ve lost. If they can’t tell the right story, you’ve lost. If they can’t read the customer’s need, you’ve lost. If they can’t connect an alternative, you’ve lost. If they can’t cross-sell, you’ve lost again.
That is why store staff weren’t at the end of the campaign. They were at the centre of the system. Because the hero product’s job wasn’t to be the last product the customer bought. It was to be the first.
Why the Hero Product’s Real Success Showed Outside Itself
This is the most valuable part of the case for me. The hero product sold extraordinarily well. But if it had only sold itself, I would have counted it as a successful product launch. What we created was bigger.
Customers came to the store to ask for the product. They tried other scents. The sales consultant suggested new products. The basket widened. Category penetration rose. Customers met the brand for the first time. And demand for the hero product started flowing to the rest of the shelf. The perfume didn’t just sell itself. It sold the shelf.
Unit sales in the niche perfume category grew by roughly 100%, and the category came to generate about 35% of total revenue. On the creation side, unit sales rose by roughly 120%; this area also became one of the core commercial engines, generating about 35% of total revenue.
That is what success means to me. Not a product growing its own P&L. But changing the economic performance of the rest of the company.
Bourdieu: A Product Doesn’t Carry Value on Its Own
Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory lets me describe this case better years later. An actor’s value doesn’t come only from its own features. It is produced by the field it sits in, its relationships, positions and different forms of capital.
The perfume wasn’t alone either. The bottle carried symbolic value. The price provided accessibility. TV created mass visibility. Influencers created social capital. Social media accelerated cultural circulation. Stores provided physical legitimacy. Sales volume turned into social proof. Marketplaces built trust. Sales consultants gave the product a human context. Each increased the value of the others.
That is why I don’t define what we did then as merely 360-degree marketing. We organised a field. And the product became an ever-stronger centre of gravity within it.
520,000 Yeses
Total Football: Everyone Attacks, but Not Everyone Is a Striker
In total football the team moves as a whole. But that doesn’t mean everyone does the same job. The goalkeeper isn’t a striker. The centre-back isn’t a winger. The midfielder isn’t a centre-forward. But when the attack begins, everyone is part of it.
The same applies in companies. An influencer isn’t a sales consultant. TV isn’t a performance ad. Outdoor isn’t CRM. A store isn’t social media. E-commerce isn’t physical retail. But all serve the same commercial result. A true 360-degree approach means every channel doing its own job while also lifting the performance of the others.
And a Team Is Only as Strong as Its Weakest Muscle
You can shoot the best ad in the world; if there’s no stock, you lose. You can reach 60 million people; if store conversion is poor, you lose. Your product can be perfect; if nobody knows about it, you lose. Your influencer campaign can go viral; if your marketplace product card is weak, you lose. You can persuade a customer to buy once; if CRM can’t bring them back, you have to buy customers again. You can make demand explode; if supply can’t carry it, success turns into crisis.
That is why a company’s real growth capacity isn’t the performance of its strongest department. It is the performance its weakest muscle allows. When I look at a company today, one of the first questions I ask is: Where is growth’s weakest muscle?
Because sometimes improving marketing doesn’t require more marketing. It requires fixing supply. Sometimes you don’t need more traffic. You need to fix conversion. Sometimes you don’t need new customers. You need to fix retention. Sometimes you don’t need a new product. You need to change the meaning of the existing one. That is exactly what happened in our case.
The Result: Not 520,000 Units, but 520,000 Purchase Decisions
In three months: 520,000 units of end-consumer sales. This number isn’t product leaving the factory, shipments to distributors, invoices to dealers or boxes sent to warehouses. It is real retail sell-out to consumers. Moreover, these 520,000 units exclude international B2B, distributor and dealer sales; with international channels added, the total commercial volume the product generated was far larger.
A daily average of 6,500 units of end-consumer sales; on some days more than 10,000 units of sell-out. That is why I don’t see 520,000 units merely as sales volume. I see 520,000 separate consumer purchase decisions. 520,000 “yeses” given at the checkout.
And those 520,000 “yeses” didn’t only grow the hero product. Niche perfume units grew by roughly 100% and creation units by roughly 120%. Social media grew by roughly 400%, monthly reach hit 60–100 million in some periods, and e-commerce grew by roughly 500%. The traffic, desire and visibility created by the hero product spread across the entire brand.
What If Kotler Had Been My Guide?
If I had relied only on past data, I would have had current sales, SKU performance, shelf productivity, segmentation, benchmarks and portfolio analysis. And all of this could have led to a decision that looked entirely rational: this product isn’t strong enough. Shelf space could have been cut. Investment could have been stopped. Maybe it would have been delisted. And the best-selling perfume in the history of Turkish perfume retail would never have existed.
Theory is powerful at explaining what happened in the past. The field sometimes lets you see what hasn’t happened yet. Sometimes marketing is the work of noticing potential nobody else can see yet and turning it into real demand.
The formula I drew from this case is still the same today: Read the culture. Know the consumer. See the signal inside behaviour. Discover desire. Place the product in the right field of meaning. Optimise the price. Organise the field. Strengthen the weakest muscle. Then attack with the whole company.
Don’t market the product. Market the meaning people want to see in it. That is how we created Turkey’s best-selling perfume.
My Recent Posts
(Gökhan Akdağ)
©2026
What Is Marketing Consulting? How to Build a Marketing Strategy, Plan, Budget and Management Discipline
Oct 9, 2026
Marketing
What Is Retail Consulting? Store Management, Sales Growth, KPIs, Profitability and Retail Math
Oct 9, 2026
Retail
What Is Commercial Growth Consulting? How to Manage Sales, Marketing, B2B, Export, Organisation and Profitable Growth
Oct 9, 2026
Strategy
FAQ
01
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03
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04
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Oct 3, 2026
How We Created Turkey’s Best-Selling Perfume
Seeing in the field what Kotler couldn’t: culture, field theory, total attack and a growth case that reached 520,000 end-consumer sales in three months. The clearest field proof of the Akdağ Doctrine.
Case Analysis
Perfume
Growth
Growth from the Field
Data told me how many units the product sold yesterday. Culture showed me how many it could sell tomorrow.®
When we created the best-selling perfume in the history of Turkish perfume retail, we didn’t have a star product. Quite the opposite.
There was a product in the portfolio with some sales volume — not entirely dead, but nobody saw it as the locomotive of the future. It sold a certain number of units every month; in other words, it had a small but organic response from consumers. Yet through the lens of classical portfolio management, that response didn’t look strong enough.
The decision for such a product is very familiar: Low shelf productivity. Limited volume. Make room for faster-moving SKUs. Shrink the product. Maybe delist it. On paper, all of this would look rational.
But what caught my attention wasn’t that the product sold little. It was that it was still selling without any special support. Because sometimes a small sales figure is not a sign of failure but of demand that hasn’t yet been unlocked. And in my view, one of a marketer’s most important jobs is to see what data can’t yet say, as much as reading what it does say.
That is exactly how this case began.
If Kotler Had Been My Guide, This Product Might Not Exist Today
My objection to Kotler here is not that the theory is entirely wrong. It is that classical Kotlerian marketing management assumes the world is too orderly, too measurable and too manageable.
Look at current sales. Define the segment. Choose the target market. Position the product. Set the price. Build distribution. Communicate. Measure. Optimise. This system is powerful. But it has a dangerous blind spot: it tries to read unrealised potential from realised data.
If I had looked at the sales report in front of me that day, I would have seen an ordinary SKU. Before the sales report, I looked at other things.
I looked at the bottle. How the product felt in the hand. Perfume habits in Turkey. The aesthetic codes of products in consumers’ bathrooms, bags and desks. How the “premium” perception of B2, C and D consumer groups is formed. How much they were willing to pay for a perfume. Which product looks expensive and which feels cheap. When a product becomes giftable.
And finally I reached a different conclusion: The problem wasn’t the product. The problem was the system of meaning the product sat in. That distinction would later turn into 520,000 units of end-consumer sales in three months.
The Product Wasn’t Bad. It Was Being Misread.
From a portfolio management perspective, the product was like a “cash cow” producing a certain volume. It sold on its own. It didn’t explode. But it didn’t die either.
I think this is exactly the signal most companies miss. If a product has been selling for years without dedicated support, the first question shouldn’t be “Why are we still keeping this?” It should be: “Why are people still buying this?”
These two questions make you look at the same product with completely different eyes. The first is SKU management. The second is consumer behaviour. I followed the second question.
What did customers love? The scent? The bottle? The price? That it looked premium? How it felt to carry? That it was giftable? That it was accessible? That they could buy the symbol of a slightly higher life at an affordable price?
All the answers led to the same place: the product’s cultural resonance was bigger than its sales figure.
Accessible Desire
The problem wasn’t the product. The problem was the system of meaning it sat in.®
The Bottle Was Telling Us Something
In the perfume industry, the bottle is not just packaging. It is the product’s first communication tool. Consumers see it before they try the scent. They pick it up. They feel its weight. They imagine how it will look on their shelf. They think about the impression it will create when given as a gift.
The bottle of our product fit Turkish perfume culture. It looked premium but didn’t use an alienating language of luxury. It was showable. Carryable. Giftable.
It sat on an important psychological balance sought by the broad B2-C-D consumer base: a product I can afford that doesn’t look cheap. That, I believe, was the product’s real potential. The sales report didn’t say it. The bottle said it. Consumer behaviour said it. Culture said it.
We Didn’t Lower the Price; We Put It in the Right Place
Creating a mass product is often wrongly understood as “making it cheap”. But price is not only an economic decision. Especially in categories with strong symbolic consumption, like perfume, price is also a message.
Go too low and you kill desire. Go too high and you kill access. The right point lies between the two.
We didn’t make the product “cheap”. We set the right distance between the product’s perceived value and the target consumer’s willingness to pay. Looking at the product, consumers had to feel two things at once: “I can buy this.” and “This doesn’t look cheap.”
Today I call this accessible desire. It is one of the most powerful spaces for mass growth.
Kotler’s Segmentation Wasn’t Enough; We Had to Read the Consumer’s Culture
Classical marketing segmentations can be necessary. Age. Income. Gender. Location. Socioeconomic group. But these don’t define consumers. They only classify them.
When you think about perfume use in Turkey, there is no such person as just a “B2-C-D consumer”. There is a person. They want to smell good. To be liked. To look well-groomed. To reward themselves. To get positive reactions when they use a product. To feel premium. But they don’t want to pay a price they can’t afford.
For them, perfume is not just a scent. It is a bit of status. A bit of confidence. A bit of visibility. A bit of identity.
That is why I don’t start marketing only from segments. I start from culture. That is exactly what I mean in the Akdağ Doctrine by “culture comes before data”. Data told me how many units the product sold yesterday. Culture showed me how many it could sell tomorrow. The difference was 520,000 units in three months.
We Didn’t Market the Product. We Marketed Desire.
What grew this product wasn’t technical messages such as “It has these notes”, “It lasts this long”, “It contains these ingredients”. All of that may be necessary as product information. But it doesn’t create demand for 520,000 units. You need to understand the feeling people want to live through the product.
We built something bigger than the product’s technical features: desire. The product became visible. Wanted. Talked about. Socially validated. Tried. Shared. Searched for. Asked about. And it started being bought.
Here is the second big point where I depart from classical marketing logic. The Kotlerian model often moves from product → segment → communication. My approach in the field works from culture → person → desire → product. You can use the same tools. But when your starting point changes, the resulting strategy changes completely.
Total Attack
Then We Went on a Total Attack
Seeing potential isn’t enough. You have to scale it. We didn’t leave marketing alone; the whole company attacked the same goal.
This is where the real work began. Today I call it Total Attack Marketing. It resembles the logic of Total Football. In total football, attacking isn’t only the striker’s job. The full-back pushes up. The midfield runs. The winger opens space. The centre-back shortens the team. The goalkeeper plays the first pass. Players take on different roles but play the same game.
TV: Taking the Product from a Small Campaign to a Mass Event
TV’s job wasn’t just reach. Digital media splits people into micro-clusters. TV is still one of the few tools that can create shared awareness across very large audiences at the same time.
Our goal wasn’t to be able to say “we have a TV ad”. It was to take the product from being a small item seen online and make it part of a mass cultural event. TV created the first big wave. But that wave wasn’t left on its own.
Outdoor: Turning the City into a Media Space
Then the product became visible in the physical world too. Outdoor isn’t just billboards. Used correctly, the city is the brand’s ongoing commercial. Main arteries. Heavy traffic routes. Areas around malls. Store locations. Consumers’ daily movement zones.
A few hours after seeing it online, consumers met the product again in the physical world. This repetition creates a powerful psychological effect: “This product is everywhere.” And after a while, “everywhere” turns into “so it must be widely preferred”. Perceived popularity starts feeding real popularity.
Social Media: Not a Communication Channel, but a Demand Engine
Our goal on social media was never to fill a content calendar. Nor was it follower count. The goal was to build a system that made people see, talk, get curious, search, go to the store, try and buy.
During this period, social media performance grew by roughly 400%. Monthly reach hit 60–100 million in some periods. But reading these figures only as social media success would be a mistake. Because the real chain was:
Visibility → Curiosity → Search → Trial → Purchase → Sharing → New Visibility
A purchase created new content. New content created new searches. New searches turned into store or e-commerce traffic. The system began to feed itself.
Influencers: Not Code Distributors, but Cultural Carriers
In influencer marketing, we didn’t get stuck in last-click logic either. Not every influencer plays the same role. Some create reach. Some trust. Some social proof. Some direct sales. Some take the product into a community you couldn’t reach before. Some make consumers feel “this product belongs to my world”.
We built scale with large accounts, trust with mid-sized creators, community penetration with micro-influencers and social proof with user-generated content. This is where the difference emerged between a brand talking about its product and people talking about it. The first is advertising. The second is cultural diffusion.
Content: Not a Single Ad Film, but a Continuous Story Flow
Shooting one hero film and running the same creative for months wasn’t enough. The product had to appear again and again in different contexts. Hero video. Short videos. Reels. TikTok. Product close-ups. Lifestyle shoots. Influencer content. UGC. Store videos. Gift scenarios. Usage rituals. Reaction content. Creatives telling the world of the scent. Trend content.
The goal wasn’t to repeat the same message. It was to keep re-creating the same desire in different cultural contexts.
Performance Marketing: It Didn’t Create Demand; It Captured the Demand We Created
Performance marketing mattered. But it wasn’t the centre of the system. Because performance marketing is usually better at capturing existing demand than creating it. We grew demand first. Then we turned it into sales through Meta, Google and other digital systems.
Over time my formula became very clear: Brand creates demand. Performance captures demand. Retail converts demand. CRM compounds demand.
When you separate these four steps, marketing departments optimise their own KPIs. When you connect them, the company grows.
Google: From Showing Ads to Being Searched For
One of the real indicators of a brand’s strength is not how many ads it shows customers. It is customers starting to search for the brand on their own. They saw it on TV. Met it again outdoors. Saw content on Instagram. Heard about it from an influencer. Then they went to Google and searched for it themselves.
At this point advertising stops chasing demand. The consumer starts chasing the brand. That was one of the most important shifts for us.
Marketplaces: Not a Sales Channel, but a Digital Shelf
We didn’t see marketplace strategy as mere distribution either. The marketplace is the digital shelf of modern retail. Search ranking. Product image. Title. Reviews. Rating. Stock. Price. Delivery. Promotion. Product content. All of these shape the consumer’s perception of the brand.
If consumers see the product on TV, come to the marketplace and find a weak product card, you lose millions in media investment in the last metre. So the digital shelf had to be part of the attack too.
E-Commerce: The Conversion Point Where the Whole System Delivers Demand
In the same period, e-commerce grew by roughly 500%. But I didn’t read this only as the website’s success. Because the website didn’t grow on its own. TV grew it. Social media grew it. Influencers grew it. Google grew it. The store network built trust. CRM brought customers back. Marketplaces widened visibility. Product demand fed the system.
Customers saw the product on Instagram one day, smelled it in a store the next, searched for it on Google in the evening, then bought it from the website or a marketplace. That is why I never found the split between “online customer” and “offline customer” sufficient. The customer is one. Channels change.
Selling the Shelf
We Used Stores Not as Points of Sale, but as a Media Network
We had a physical network of hundreds of stores. Seeing it only as a distribution advantage would have been a big mistake. A store is also media. The window is media. The tester is media. The shelf is media. The in-store screen is media. The bag is media. The sales consultant is media. The checkout is media. The scent experience itself is media.
We turned the desire created online into a real experience in the physical world. Consumers no longer just saw the product on a screen. They touched it. Smelled it. Tried it. And decided.
Visual Merchandising: The Shelf Is Not a Democracy
Giving every SKU equal space isn’t good merchandising. Because not every product has the same commercial job. If the hero product is going to generate traffic, it has to behave like a hero in the store too. Window. Facing. Testers. Product height. Visual support. Link to checkout. Sales consultant priority.
The product’s entire in-store visibility must be rethought according to its strategic role. When demand created by marketing walks into a store and can’t find the product, or the product gets lost on the shelf, a large part of the advertising budget is wasted.
The Sales Consultant: Marketing’s Last Metre
In my view, the most underrated medium in marketing is the sales consultant. You show ads to millions of people. The customer comes to the store. Who is in front of them a few seconds before the purchase decision? The sales consultant.
If they don’t know the product, you’ve lost. If they can’t tell the right story, you’ve lost. If they can’t read the customer’s need, you’ve lost. If they can’t connect an alternative, you’ve lost. If they can’t cross-sell, you’ve lost again.
That is why store staff weren’t at the end of the campaign. They were at the centre of the system. Because the hero product’s job wasn’t to be the last product the customer bought. It was to be the first.
Why the Hero Product’s Real Success Showed Outside Itself
This is the most valuable part of the case for me. The hero product sold extraordinarily well. But if it had only sold itself, I would have counted it as a successful product launch. What we created was bigger.
Customers came to the store to ask for the product. They tried other scents. The sales consultant suggested new products. The basket widened. Category penetration rose. Customers met the brand for the first time. And demand for the hero product started flowing to the rest of the shelf. The perfume didn’t just sell itself. It sold the shelf.
Unit sales in the niche perfume category grew by roughly 100%, and the category came to generate about 35% of total revenue. On the creation side, unit sales rose by roughly 120%; this area also became one of the core commercial engines, generating about 35% of total revenue.
That is what success means to me. Not a product growing its own P&L. But changing the economic performance of the rest of the company.
Bourdieu: A Product Doesn’t Carry Value on Its Own
Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory lets me describe this case better years later. An actor’s value doesn’t come only from its own features. It is produced by the field it sits in, its relationships, positions and different forms of capital.
The perfume wasn’t alone either. The bottle carried symbolic value. The price provided accessibility. TV created mass visibility. Influencers created social capital. Social media accelerated cultural circulation. Stores provided physical legitimacy. Sales volume turned into social proof. Marketplaces built trust. Sales consultants gave the product a human context. Each increased the value of the others.
That is why I don’t define what we did then as merely 360-degree marketing. We organised a field. And the product became an ever-stronger centre of gravity within it.
520,000 Yeses
Total Football: Everyone Attacks, but Not Everyone Is a Striker
In total football the team moves as a whole. But that doesn’t mean everyone does the same job. The goalkeeper isn’t a striker. The centre-back isn’t a winger. The midfielder isn’t a centre-forward. But when the attack begins, everyone is part of it.
The same applies in companies. An influencer isn’t a sales consultant. TV isn’t a performance ad. Outdoor isn’t CRM. A store isn’t social media. E-commerce isn’t physical retail. But all serve the same commercial result. A true 360-degree approach means every channel doing its own job while also lifting the performance of the others.
And a Team Is Only as Strong as Its Weakest Muscle
You can shoot the best ad in the world; if there’s no stock, you lose. You can reach 60 million people; if store conversion is poor, you lose. Your product can be perfect; if nobody knows about it, you lose. Your influencer campaign can go viral; if your marketplace product card is weak, you lose. You can persuade a customer to buy once; if CRM can’t bring them back, you have to buy customers again. You can make demand explode; if supply can’t carry it, success turns into crisis.
That is why a company’s real growth capacity isn’t the performance of its strongest department. It is the performance its weakest muscle allows. When I look at a company today, one of the first questions I ask is: Where is growth’s weakest muscle?
Because sometimes improving marketing doesn’t require more marketing. It requires fixing supply. Sometimes you don’t need more traffic. You need to fix conversion. Sometimes you don’t need new customers. You need to fix retention. Sometimes you don’t need a new product. You need to change the meaning of the existing one. That is exactly what happened in our case.
The Result: Not 520,000 Units, but 520,000 Purchase Decisions
In three months: 520,000 units of end-consumer sales. This number isn’t product leaving the factory, shipments to distributors, invoices to dealers or boxes sent to warehouses. It is real retail sell-out to consumers. Moreover, these 520,000 units exclude international B2B, distributor and dealer sales; with international channels added, the total commercial volume the product generated was far larger.
A daily average of 6,500 units of end-consumer sales; on some days more than 10,000 units of sell-out. That is why I don’t see 520,000 units merely as sales volume. I see 520,000 separate consumer purchase decisions. 520,000 “yeses” given at the checkout.
And those 520,000 “yeses” didn’t only grow the hero product. Niche perfume units grew by roughly 100% and creation units by roughly 120%. Social media grew by roughly 400%, monthly reach hit 60–100 million in some periods, and e-commerce grew by roughly 500%. The traffic, desire and visibility created by the hero product spread across the entire brand.
What If Kotler Had Been My Guide?
If I had relied only on past data, I would have had current sales, SKU performance, shelf productivity, segmentation, benchmarks and portfolio analysis. And all of this could have led to a decision that looked entirely rational: this product isn’t strong enough. Shelf space could have been cut. Investment could have been stopped. Maybe it would have been delisted. And the best-selling perfume in the history of Turkish perfume retail would never have existed.
Theory is powerful at explaining what happened in the past. The field sometimes lets you see what hasn’t happened yet. Sometimes marketing is the work of noticing potential nobody else can see yet and turning it into real demand.
The formula I drew from this case is still the same today: Read the culture. Know the consumer. See the signal inside behaviour. Discover desire. Place the product in the right field of meaning. Optimise the price. Organise the field. Strengthen the weakest muscle. Then attack with the whole company.
Don’t market the product. Market the meaning people want to see in it. That is how we created Turkey’s best-selling perfume.
My Recent Posts
©2026
What Is Marketing Consulting? How to Build a Marketing Strategy, Plan, Budget and Management Discipline
Oct 9, 2026
Marketing
What Is Retail Consulting? Store Management, Sales Growth, KPIs, Profitability and Retail Math
Oct 9, 2026
Retail
What Is Commercial Growth Consulting? How to Manage Sales, Marketing, B2B, Export, Organisation and Profitable Growth
Oct 9, 2026
Strategy
FAQ
What does GA Consulting do?
What is your approach?
How do projects progress?
What is your focus?
Which areas do you work in?
What value does it create for companies?
Which companies is it right for?
How long until a project delivers results?