By Monica Showalter
Did Maybelline learn nothing from the Bud Light fiasco?
It’s hard to think otherwise, now that it’s trying to sell its beauty product with this weirdo:
That’s a grown man using women’s Maybelline makeup, and he puts those products on like a clown.
Who is Maybelline’s audience here? What are they trying to do?
Are they trying to sell to circus freaks?
Are they telling women to buy these products so that ‘you, too, can look like a clown?” Are they planning a line of fake beards for the gals,too?
Or are they expecting women to translate the experience down into their own context from his, as if they were the outsiders here in this world of women’s makeup, which extremely bad UX/UI as they say in the web design world, forcing customers to take those extra steps to get to “buy,” which is not how ads are supposed to work.
Makeup itself is historically associated with magic, with longing, with transforming oneself into something more beautiful than one is. That explains why women buy makeup. They do it to please themselves, they do it to have credibility at work or at court or at places of that nature where they need to be listened to and believed, they do it to best their female rivals for men’s attention, and they do it to attract men.
Not one of those things are accomplished with this freak appointed as Maybelline’s makeup spokesman.
News reports say that consumers do intend to boycott this company for its obvious contempt for its customers and they buy makeup.
Like Bud Light, Maybelline itself is a fairly low end makeup brand with many rivals. If these are the same customers as the Bud Light customers (and yes, Bud Light had a lot of women customers), it almost seems like a given that they will carry on with such a boycott, or, rather, flight, since they’re likely the same people.
Personal products, as Tom Wolfe noted in his piece called “The Natural” on black baseball player Willy Hammer who was featured in a men’s perfume ad, can evince some of the most visceral reactions and responses from customers if they are not played right and if customers are not receptive. Wolfe wasn’t just blowing air here — he had interviewed Mad Men-type Madison Avenue advertising executives for his piece on the advertising trade. (The television series Mad Men may very well have been named after Wolfe’s book where the essay appeared: “Mauve Gloves and Madmen, Clutter and Vine.”) If that’s true, and I think it is, then some very basic rules of advertising, including the importance of not insulting one’s customers, is pretty obvious. I know I quit buying M.A.C. cosmetics back in 1998 when they started featuring a drag queen in store displays for their makeup. I didn’t want to look like a drag queen or be forced to benchmark that look as the ultimate look I would be going for. I just moved on to Laura Mercier — which was a higher-end label, just as the Bud Light customers moved on to higher-end, higher quality Modelo Especial.
These things are how customers behave.
Even if the ad makers knew nothing about the rules of advertising successfully, though, there’s no excuse for these people not to have noticed what happened to Bud Light when they started insulting their own female customers, thrusting a bearded male in front of them as the be-all of beauty, when there was nothing beautiful about his use of female beauty products.
Apparently, they thought that lesson didn’t apply to them, perhaps because they’re in a glamour industry, and glamour industries often have significant participation of the gay community. That’s actually never been a problem in the past in terms of attracting customers — but it is when the product becomes all about the strangest, most outre, most shock-the-bourgeoisie, aspects of the beauty trade. Women don’t want that thrown in their faces to the exclusion of their beauty needs, which they want to see affirmed, not mocked.
It’s sad stuff, but they dropped themselves into this. Now they can pay the bearded piper.