Can I vent? A very good and dear friend is thinking about starting a line of cosmetics. He has a lot of experience as a formulator. He asks for my help. I give him the ‘hook’ for the product, the raison d’être… the story that he creates for his sales force, shows on his website, and tells consumers to make his product stand out from the thousands of face creams that seem to hit the market each year. He accepts the idea with lots of thanks. Two weeks later as he’s organizing the company, I’m “just a copywriter,” a phrase that he probably got from his attorney.
OK, let’s be brutally honest. Without the story he has NOTHING… unless you think another me-too product is something.
When it comes to cosmetics, there’s precious little difference between, say, one anti-aging face cream or another. Government regulations limit what can go into the product and what claims can be made. Plus, if one face cream has made it big, most formulators try to develop a slightly different version but with the same actives. (That’s why pentapeptides or their derivatives are in just about every anti-aging cream.) Differences usually include packaging and delivery… you know, spray or cream, airless pump or liquid, etc.
Chances are what differentiates one cream from another is the level of the actives (which can’t vary much because of the claims), the source of the actives (vitamin C from oranges v. grapefruit v. breadfruit v. the mountain grapes from Patagonia) and the ‘dusting’ of ingredients used to flush out the label and obfuscate the actives.
So what makes one cream successful and the other a $5 shot in the clearance bin at Marshall’s?
The story. One cream is a new, miracle breakthrough, the other is “the stretch mark cream turned anti-wrinkle phenomenon’” and “the #1 cream in France, of all places.” One sells ZERO – the other sells half a billion dollars or more.
But to most pseudo-marketers (read as ‘scientists’) it’s the formulation that makes a product successful or it’s the sales guy or it’s how well the product is managed.
OMG… IT’S THE STORY!!!! DUH??????
The formulation is just goop in a tube until you tell/show people what it is and why it’s different! Without the story, your crack sales team has nothing new to offer. Think I’m wrong? Have your crack salesman take a blank tube of cream into Sephora and try to sell it to the buyer.
But don’t listen to me… I’m “just the copywriter.”
“Consumers want a new story... authenticity, not spin... participation, not propaganda.”
