C&T advertising is formulaic, says Rob Gray, managing partner at Purity, but it needn’t be so predictable. If companies spent their money on creating campaigns that really spoke to their target audience and made use of the available marketing tools then they may well see a better return on their investment
We live now in a culture that applauds beauty, and has forced us to place ever more importance on the way we look, how we present ourselves and how we feel. Even the current obsession with so called celebrity culture has its origins deeply routed in how we perceive one another. Celebrities of course represent a lifestyle, one in which everyone knows your name, and where you are treated like something special. Fame for many has becomes the ultimate goal, unsurprisingly sitting hand in hand with appearance; ensuring our never ending quest for skin deep beauty knows no bounds.
To put it plainly, consumers today are willing to pay heavily in their efforts to buy hope in a pot and health and beauty brands are willing to do everything they can to meet this demand.
The not so secret formula
The vast majority of health and beauty marketing follows a formula, the first and most obvious ingredient being money. The major brands invest huge sums in launching new products, building their brands, and ensuring that they are always front of mind with their audiences. In many ways it's simply a numbers game. By making sure they spend enough on promoting products by advertising through every conceivable channel, these brands can launch almost anything to the market, and guarantee ultimate success.
In fact, many big brands will happily weather a loss for the first year or more after a product is launched, to ensure that it is so entrenched in the market that it is then able to compete with other products and cement a solid position in the consumer psyche.
Beyond this accepted wisdom, the creative approach of many health and beauty brands also follows something of a predictable formula. Ad campaigns for shampoo, hair colourants, make-up and moisturiser will generally all include one or more of the following elements:
1. A revolutionary new ingredient – something that makes the product unique, and that is an active substance that is close to fairy dust in its reported properties.
2. A celebrity endorser – most likely an A-list film star who extols the virtues of the product, whilst simultaneously swishing their hair/ rubbing their soft,
unwrinkled skin.
3. A journalistic endorser – perhaps the editor of a well known glossy magazine, again explaining just how good the product is.
On the whole this approach is a successful one, but it's debatable whether the creative approach is the success, or whether much of it is based on the amount of budget being invested in advertisements and other marketing, allied to an audience hungry for a miracle fix.
Often, brands that can afford large media buying budgets can also afford to stick to what they know will work. It's no surprise then that the biggest spenders in the industry like L'Oréal and P&G have the most successful brands, even though the creative approach they take is a traditional one.
The Lynx effect
However, there are larger brands that dare to do something different, or at the very least, dare to push the boundaries with their marketing. Lynx has evolved over the last few years, and has become a core brand to males aged from teens to their mid twenties. Its campaigns, while different in terms of creative execution, all focus around one single message: if you use this product, you're more likely to get laid. Hardly rocket science, but this message is one that strikes home with this target audience. Lynx offers hope in a can to millions of boys, at a time during their lives when they're passing through the difficulties of puberty, and taking their first steps as fully grown-up men.
“Often, brands that can afford large media buying budgets can also afford to stick to what they know will work.” |
Rob Gray, Purity |
Granted, Lynx invests millions in ensuring its ads are always in front of this audience, but its focus on understanding exactly what motivates its target audience and hammering this message home in a variety of ways has proved extremely successful. Even its latest “Bom chicka wah wah” campaign follows this same formula.
Doing something different
Most interesting are the brands that have made a departure from the norm, to try new ways of promoting themselves to consumers. Dove made waves in the market through its Real Women campaign. Never before had a brand used models that weren't of a prescribed beauty and size, and by involving real customers in the campaign, Dove was able to stand apart from its rivals in the market and champion beauty in everyone.
This campaign worked especially well by juxtaposing its message against the way society now grades beauty, reaching out to real people and helping to give them the confidence to feel beautiful, even if they didn't fit in with the stereotypical view. This message again hit home with the target audience, because they are all ‘real’ women.
However, while extremely successful at the time, the campaign has now been running, in various guises, for a number of years. Although it's still different from what much of the market is doing, it is perhaps a little stale. Rehashing the same angle over and over again may be causing Dove to lose sight of how innovation and new thinking can take a brand forward.
Sanex has recently launched a four-pronged advertising campaign to create greater awareness of the skin as the body’s largest organ. This advertising campaign is particularly interesting as not only does it break free from the traditional pretty-girl-using-the-product formula, but also takes an educational, health conscious approach to beauty. The advert features over 100 naked professional dancers, each representing an individual skin cell, to bring the processes of skin to life and highlight the fact that our skin is alive.
A smaller, less established brand can still make a huge impact on the market, even without a multi-million pound advertising budget. Ghd has firmly put its brand into the market by using a glamorous, tongue in cheek approach. Its ads, depicting women in control of their lives and most importantly their hair, has struck a chord by again appealing to the target audience of young and demanding women. It's also enjoyed the achievement of making something as seemingly functional as hair straighteners into a high fashion product, cutting through the market dominated by more traditional white goods manufacturers. The success of ghd is growing as well, with the brand recently launching a cosmetics range to stand alongside its traditional products.
Niche brands too are able to carve themselves a trading space, even on a tight budget. Elemis has emerged as a strong premium brand, which has drawn on its health spa roots as a key differentiator in the market. By offering customers a spa experience when
visiting premium department stores like Harrods and Selfridges, the brand has built itself a powerful reputation which has been helped along by word of mouth, all for a relatively low cost.
To be green or not too green?
Another area health and beauty brands are beginning to respond to is environmental and green issues. Typically, the big brands tend to approach this with money – L'Oréal's purchase of The Body Shop provided it with bolt on green credentials. But consumers are becoming more sophisticated, and more cynical of such moves.
The Body Shop has also seen its dominance of the alternative market shaken by brands such as Lush, which has enjoyed impressive growth due to the community feel it engenders in its customers with its in-store magazine and through well trained and approachable staff.
Just like when marketing any other product, health and beauty brands need to focus on who their target audience is and how to motivate them to purchase. Once they have this message in focus, how it is delivered to the target audience is almost immaterial. Yes a large media budget will help, but equally a solid idea can reach and engage the target audience, even if delivered by limited means. Perhaps the most important point is that, although the larger brands rely on bombarding consumers, there are also examples where an innovative and inexpensive approach has delivered.
Whether a niche brand or a new launch from a more established player, those in the health and beauty market shouldn't be afraid to try new ideas. As long as a campaign is created with the target audience in mind, it doesn't have to be of a typical execution to demonstrate to the consumer just why they should purchase the product.
C&T marketing: targeting the message
Nivea is taking advantage of new technology to target its advertising on an individual basis. The brand is to use user profiling and gender targeting features in its latest campaign, run on ATM machines. Once the customer inserts their card into the ATM machine, ATM:ad technology will identify their gender and play the appropriate content.
Elizabeth Arden, meanwhile, has launched a US-wide promotional campaign for the latest fragrance under its Britney Spears license. Midnight Fantasy will be accompanied by an innovative PR campaign that will see fans receiving customised phone calls from Spears.
Arden is using Interactive Voice Recording technology to personalise the messages, and senders who register on the site will be able to provide the recipient’s name and personality to tailor the message to their individual tastes.