Guerlain is credited with the introduction of liprouge in a stick form, but the first modern lipstick in a metal case was produced in 1915 by Maurice Levy of the Scovil Manufacturing Company of Waterbury, Connecticut. One of the criticisms of the advertising industry is that it creates idealized stereotypes that in some way it forces ordinary women to live up to. It is alleged that by doing this advertising makes women dissatisfied with the way they are and leads them to spend an unnecessary amount of money attempting to conform with an impossible image of beauty. Leaving aside for the moment whether or not people have free will and control over their own purses, it's worth looking at a well-documented example of an advertising campaign that deliberately attempted to wean a brand off a long-term diet of celebrity endorsement in favour of relatively unknown models presenting a more 'accessible' notion of beauty.
In 2000 Revlon Inc. hired a new outside advertising agency, Kirshenbaum Bond & Partners, to modernize its image and parted company with celebrity supermodel Cindy Crawford, its prime 'face' for 11 years. Apparently their market research had revealed that their customers were tired of celebrity and wanted a more normal or everyday version of beauty portrayed in Revlon advertising. Responding to this, KB&P developed a new campaign featuring relatively unknown 'girl-next-door' models and a new slogan 'It's fabulous being a woman'. Some US Dollars 90 million was allocated to the campaign, a 30% increase on 2000. However, it was not a success. Sales from continuing operations fell 3.1% to US Dollars 972.6 million in the nine months ended the 30 of September compared with US Dollars 1 billion in the corresponding year before.
Revlon's share of the cosmetics market fell 10.6% in the 52 weeks ended December 2000 to 15.1%, according to Information Resources Inc., a market research company that tracks sales in the sector. Faced with this disastrous foray into 'more ordinary' female imagery Revlon did an abrupt about turn and went straight back to celebrity endorsement using actresses such as Halle Berry, Julianne Moore and James King, star of the cult movie Blow. This strategy seems to have paid off. In July 2003, the company published figures showing that market share for Revlon had grown to 17% from 16.4% a year earlier, while overall sales were up 5%.
Nearly all the major cosmetics brands have known for decades what Revlon had to relearn, which is that celebrities sell cosmetics. The list of just some of the famous stars and models who have been enlisted to their causes reads like a mini-who's who:
Watching movies and TV shows featuring celebrities, reading about them in magazines and newspapers and logging onto their websites all provide great entertainment for millions of people. But celebrities also fulfil a very valuable function as role models. In a sense, they are a very public form of human research and development, which people can use to make the best of their own appearance. They can follow successful experiments in hair and makeup carried out by some of the most glamorous people in the world, some of whom friends say look just a little bit like them.
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1. Gilbert Andreson alias Broncho Billy and early Hollywood
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