Perfume, once a true luxury product, has become, with a few exceptions, a mere commodity in recent years. Now designer and luxury labels and the cosmetics giants are trying to restore fragrance's prestige, notably at the high end of the market.

"Fragrance launches are more like movie releases or record launches," said John Dempsey, the global brand president of Estée Lauder. The Lauder company recently introduced Private Collection Tuberose Gardenia [...] "We felt we had to reinvent and recreate what fragrance is about", Dempsey explained. "When the business gets too big, we need to make it small again, restore the prestige back into the industry and take a more niche, specialty approach."

— from Perfume industry aims to regain prestige, in the International Herald Tribune. My question: can this approach work when everybody is doing it? That is, if the high end market is just as flooded with product as the low end market, isn't even expensive "niche" perfume "a mere commodity"?