Dylan Mulvaney in the Spotlight (Again)

US brands are really going woke. 

 

Maybelline is the latest to be threatened with a public boycott after sponsoring transgender social media influencer Dylan Mulvaney to post a video online promoting its make-up. I’m sure you’d remember “her” from the Bud Light and Nike promos as per my post “Brands Go Woke” published April 16, 2023. 

 

In the Maybelline promotion video posted on TikTok last month, Mulvaney is make-up free before she “gets glam” with eyeshadow, lipstick and other products. The video was posted as Mulvaney approached her 100th day of publicly identifying as a woman. 

 

It came as another major commercial brand, Anheuser-Busch's Bud Light, is dealing with a boycott of its beer due to its partnership with Mulvaney. The brand has seen sales take a dive and two high ranking marketing execs have been asked to go on leave. 

 

“The latest fools to employ Dylan Mulvaney are make-up company Maybelline”, one Twitter user wrote on April 24. “Get woke, go broke”. 

 

Another Twitter user wrote: “Time for #BoycottMaybelline to trend, since Maybelline used Dylan Mulvaney as their sponsor”. 

 

One more tweeted: “Hey [Maybelline] Women have fought for years to get to where we are, women's rights are being taking back by these men, and you support it. Please all of us born women let's [boycottmaybelline]”. 

 

L’Oreal Group, the parent company of Maybelline are keeping their heads down.

Bottles that Safeguard the Environment

The quest to design more sustainable bottles has led a quartet of companies – Danish beer maker Carlsberg, spirits company Absolut (part of France’s Pernod Ricard), French personal care company L’Oreal and a European group of beverage firm Coca-Cola – to consider a seemingly unlikely material for containing liquids: paper.

Product development teams at all four companies are part of a "pioneer community" brought together and coordinated by an aptly named startup Paboco, shorthand for "paper bottle company". 

Together, they are working on prototypes of bio-based containers of varying shapes and sizes that use wood fiber, rather than glass or some form of fabric, to hold anything from lotions to carbonated beverages – and that is already a challenge. 

"The paper bottle concept is still extremely early in its lifecycle, and so we will actively work within the community to advance the prototypes and overcome some of the hurdles we jointly discover", noted Stijn Franssen (right), senior engineering for packaging with Coca-Cola’s research and development team for Europe. 

Coca-Cola’s work on the paper bottle is one of many alternative packaging approaches the company is considering and experimenting with as they work toward a goal of using 50 percent renewable or recyclable materials in all of their products by 2030; in fact, they have pledged to make all of their packaging recyclable by 2025. 

Not only that but it seems that Paboco technology even offers unique capabilities toward differentiating, alternative shapes and details. 

"A distinctive design, together with the correct functionality while contributing to a sustainable packaging future, that is what this innovation project is all about", Franssen said.

Beauty Products That Embrace Racism

I think it’s right that Johnson & Johnson have arrived at a decision to stop selling skin-whitening creams popular in Asia. 

Their products have come under renewed social pressure in recent weeks amid an increasing strident global debate about racial inequality. 

Already, they are discontinuing their Neutrogena Fine Fairness line. And a company spokesperson told Reuters on Friday they will cease selling their Clean & Clear Fairness products in India too. 

The healthcare company said they would no longer produce or ship the products, but that they might still appear on store shelves until stocks run out. 

India is said to be one of the fastest growing markets for skin-whitening soaps and cream. The "fairness" (an euphemism for "whiteness" really) market generates sales of $432 million and it is growing annually by 17 percent. 

And Unilever's Fair and Lovely skin whitening cream has the largest share of the cosmetic market in India. Their commercials carry a makeover narrative that depicts dark-skinned women transforming into light-skinned women will indeed spawn success in romance and careers.

The skin-whitening market that includes Garnier's White Complete, L'Oréal's White Perfect, and Ponds' White Beauty recruit light-skinned Bollywood superstars – the likes of Priyanka Chopra, Aishwarya Rai, and Hrithik Roshan – to sell fantasies of epidermal transformation as the basis for a happy and rewarding life. 

All the world’s biggest personal care companies, including Unilever, Procter & Gamble and L’Oreal under their respective brands Fair & Lovely, Olay and Garnier are hawking lotions that promise to lighten (or brighten) skin. 

According to Quartz, this is a $10-billion-dollar global skin-lightening market that aggressively peddles dozens of high- and low-end skin-lightening products to consumers in Asia and Africa. 

Whether we care to admit it or not, these products only serve to reinforce the flighty notion that fair skin is the beauty standard. A perfect life from perfect skin – but only for those of the ‘right’ (read, ‘fair’) shade – is the message and mindset that’s being communicated to the world. 

This has created a multibillion-dollar industry in cosmetic creams and invasive procedures such as skin bleaching, chemical peels, laser treatments, steroid cocktails, “whitening” pills and intravenous injections – all with varying effectiveness and health risks. 

It’s more than a bias, it’s a downright dangerous cultural obsession. 

Sunil Bhatia (right), a professor of human development at Connecticut College, USA, in his piece about deep-rooted internalised racism and social hierarchies based on skin color published on April 17, 2017 in US News & World Report said emphatically: “This is not bias. This is racism”. 

This darker skin stigma, and rigid cultural perception that correlates lighter skin tone with beauty and “personal success” is wrong! 

And I blame it on the Western media's dominance across the world where they preach "whiteness" as an idealized image and which has become transnational. 

The fact that the non-white population embraces it so readily is really sad and hard to swallow because it means they are ever willing to surrender their self-respect and dignity as persons of “color”.

L'Oreal Are Doing It Right

Reuters pic 

Marketers are treading new ground in their bid to stay at the top of their game. Check out what L’Oreal are doing at the Festival de Cannes (May 08-19, 2018)!

Chinese pop star Chris Lee (also Li Yuchun) glided down the hallway of Cannes’ Hotel Martinez in a tuxedo-inspired Jean Paul Gaultier gown and blue-gray pixie haircut, with a throng of L’Oreal videographers trotting backward to stay out of the frame. 

After striking a few poses on the marbled staircase, she headed for the red carpet. The footage was rushed to L’Oreal’s editing suite, where waiting editors and producers stitched together clips to post everywhere from Instagram to China’s Weibo within hours of the shoot. 

This is how the world’s biggest beauty brand promotes itself in the smartphone age. 

With foot traffic slipping in retail stores, eyeballs switching from televisions to mobile screens and China’s digitally savvy consumers driving growth, L’Oreal SA pulled out all the stops at the world’s most watched film festival. 

L’Oreal Paris, the company’s flagship consumer brand, is using its unrivaled scale to fund ever-bigger events, including a live talk show on the Cannes beach with film stars like Jane Fonda and Isabelle Adjani. Some segments were even produced in Mandarin, hosted by Chinese-American TV star Hung Huang and published on Alibaba Group Holding Ltd’s TMall. 

L’Oreal Paris’s global brand president, Pierre-Emmanuel Angeloglou, speaking from a two-story video studio built for the occasion on the Cannes beach believes “Cannes is a spectacular opportunity for us to produce a lot of content, and this year we wanted to take it even further. The more we can combine accessibility and direct contact with consumers with the aspirational nature and beauty of cinema, the better”. 

The studio against a backdrop of yachts crossing the Mediterranean harbor and equipped with a vintage convertible for capturing models tossing their hair in the breeze, marked a change of scenery from the celebrity magazines and nightly news shows that L’Oreal used to rely on to get out their marketing message. 

Staying in the spotlight with a constant flow of interesting content over Facebook, Instagram and Chinese networks like Weibo and WeChat has become a business imperative for L’Oreal as they navigate the decline of traditional media atop a chilling wave of retail closures. 

The Chinese market, already L’Oreal’s second biggest after the US of A, with about $2.6 billion in sales last year, is undergoing what CEO Jean-Paul Agon calls a “particularly violent” shift to e-commerce, and online sales made up more than a third of sales last year. 

And I agree whole-heartedly that this is the way to go for the world’s most famous brands if they wish to continue to hold onto and/or even grow sales and market share in a hyper-competitive world. 

It is a given that even established brands like L’Oreal can no longer depend on their reputation. 

As Delphine Dion, marketing professor at France’s Essec Business School, citing mounting competition from homegrown competitors in China, social-media-driven upstarts like LVMH’s Fenty Beauty by Rihanna and South Korean beauty brands like Mizon, said: “They have to keep making buzz online or else they’ll lose out”. 

L’Oreal’s partnerships with Instagram influencers and beauty-blogging YouTube stars have helped drive booming makeup sales, Dion said, so it makes sense for the company to step up their digital efforts with more established representatives like Julianne Moore and China’s Li. 

In the flurry of videos L’Oreal produced during the festival, red-carpet struts were interspersed with product demos and interviews with the brand’s ambassadors. And L’Oreal promises viewers an instant reward: In one Instagram story, red-carpet snapshots of Moore were followed by a suggestion to swipe up for a 20 percent discount on glitter cream. 

The combination of staging elaborate events, publicizing them via social media and easing the path to points of sale is showing signs of success. When L’Oreal launched a collaboration with designer Olivier Rousteing and fashion brand Balmain last year, video ads linked to Alibaba’s TMall, driving sales of 40,000 lipsticks in the first month. 

In other words, L’Oreal are very clever about doing what is called all-media distribution – the strategy of producing their own content and handing it over to a range of outlets. That helps the brand get around a common problem for marketers in China – that media owners block links to content from rival platforms when users share it, making exclusive deals less effective.

I grant that you get a lot more exposure this way. 

If China gets special treatment in L’Oreal’s online efforts – as with the Mandarin edition of the Cannes talk show – it’s not only because of the scale of the opportunity, but because lessons learned in the most advanced market for e-commerce can be exported around the world. 

One takeaway: Mixing entertainment and retailing works. 

Marketing is constantly evolving. The necessity to connect with audiences remains and with consumers embracing smartphones as never before – this poses a challenge to marketers.

In that sense, L’Oreal is a market pioneer.

Collin Tiew Resigns

Collin Tiew has tendered his resignation from all party posts, following his involvement in Perkasa’s white envelope incident. [To get the full story, read my postings: “White Ang Pows from Perkasa” dated January 29, 2012 and followed by “MCA Abets Perkasa” dated January 31, 2012]. But the man has pride – he explained that his inactiveness in the party was the main reason for his quitting. Chua Soi Lek, on the other hand, is mighty pleased that Tiew took responsibility, believing that this will absolve MCA - but he is so wrong. The Chinese community cannot just forgive and forget because it was the MCA that had slept with the enemy! In this matter, MCA is more guilty than Perkasa!

I was wrong. Of the teams participating in the L’Oreal Brandstorm 2012, only 23 teams made the cut to the semi-finals and Team Lotus wasn’t one of them. I am of course, very disappointed but chin up, girls! – let’s try again next year! SUBS students don't know the meaning of surrender!

After a fifteen-day hiatus, I resumed my Toastmastering and this evening, I attended the MIHRM Toastmasters meeting – where I took up the role of a Grammarian. A meeting that could be best described as moving at a sedate pace. But it was still meaningful because the club was celebrating its twelveth anniversary! This meeting scored poorly (a 2.5 out of a 10) because among other reasons, we started twenty-seven minutes late!

Yesterday, Taman Indrahana had their Lunar New Year dinner at the Oversea Restaurant in Jaya One, Petaling Jaya. Yup, there was good food, good company and good fun.

The Airbrushed Rachel Weisz

UK's Advertising Standards Authority is banning a L’Oreal magazine advert, ruling that the image of Hollywood actress Rachel Weisz, pictured, “misleadingly exaggerated” the performance of Revitalift Repair 10, an age-defying beauty product. If you check out the print ad, Weisz, 41, indeed looked 20 years younger!

Image credit: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/index.html

Image credit; http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2094440/Rachel-Weisz-advert-banned-LOreal-admits-airbrushing.html

The marketing for L’Oreal’s Revitalift range claims it makes the skin feel firmer, toned, and more supple. The ASA did not challenge these, however it was unhappy that the actress’s image was used to substantiate the claims that the ‘Skin looks smoother’ and ‘Complexion looks more even’.

Last year, L’Oreal adverts featuring Julia Roberts and Christy Turlington were also banned for being deceptive. It’s a real shame that a company like L’Oreal has to resort to airbrushing to make their products look good!

The Lotus Girls

Yesterday afternoon, Derek Ong and I accompanied three SUBS students to L’Oreal Malaysia. These students (Rachel Wong Jing Mun, Madeline Tanamal Tan Ka Yen and Ngan Kah Ling) are members of Team Lotus and one of two teams representing Sunway University at the L’Oreal Brandstorm 2012 – an international marketing competition that is drawing more than 50,000 participating students in over 285 universities in more than 45 countries worldwide.

In Malaysia, there will be altogether 55 teams making 10-minute presentations over two days (i.e. yesterday and today). The Lotus girls went through their preliminary round on Monday. I am confident they did well and I am sure they will progress to the next round!

Check out photos of these girls practicing in NE3-4 at Sunway University before proceeding to a simple lunch at Lameeya in Damansara Utama, and then onward to the L’Oreal office in Uptown 2, Damansara Uptown: