Friends Reunited launches themed perfumes

Friends Reunited is creating a range of limited edition perfumes designed to reflect the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s and evoke people’s personal memories as it looks to raise brand awareness in its first major campaign since being bought by Brightsolid.

Friends Reunited

The PR driven marketing activity aims to revive people’s interest in the site and drive awareness of its new positioning as the home of nostalgia and memories.

The fragrances, Night Fever (70s), Vice (80s) and Take Spice (90s), claim to “bottle the nation’s favourite memories” of each decade including disco, the Spice Girls and Brit Pop, and have been inspired by the memories users have contributed to the site.

Vice includes particles of shredded £50 notes to evoke memories of 80s yuppies alongside “essence of coal” to represent Thatcher Britain, while Night Fever contains glitter flakes.

A limited number of bottles of the perfumes are available to win through Friends Reunited’s Facebook page.

“Spoof ads” (see right) have been created and are intended to be “shareable” to create word of mouth around the activity and drive people to the site.

Friends Reunited hopes to highlight that it offers a “more personal” platform than rival social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, which have eclipsed its popularity.

Matt Bushby, head of Friends Reunited, says: “Friends Reunited now helps you remember all of your most cherished moments so we thought it would be really fun to see if we could evoke a sense of nostalgia amongst the British public by attempting to bottle the nation’s memories of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.

Brightsolid, which is owned by publisher DC Thomson, bought Friends Reunited from ITV for £25m in 2010. ITV had previously bought the network for £175m.

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