Pierce Mattie Public Relations New York & Los Angeles

Branding Strategies Appeal to the Everyday Woman

As we all know, the aging baby boomers make up the majority of the consumer market.  Therefore it should be no surprise that the media is chock full of messages positioned to the older or, more generally speaking, the “everyday woman.”  That's why CoverGirl will be featuring comedienne Ellen DeGeneres, 49 and very “nontraditional” beauty, in an ad campaign starting January 2009.

Editor in Chief of More, a magazine for women over 40, Leslie Jane Seymour, agrees with this new positioning strategy when she told New York Times, "We don't need to see another ingénue rocking to the top--we're getting worn out by the Lindsays and Britneys, and I think we need a break."

She continued, "[Women] just want to be the best that they can be for the stage of life that they are in."

Ellen joins Queen Latifah and recent America's Next Top (Plus Size) Model Whitney Thompson in a line up of CoverGirl's quite different from the Nikki Taylor's of the 90s.  These women each have characteristics more representative of the actual psycho/demographics of American women, excluding income of course.

That's where Dove takes a further step by featuring no-name women of all shapes, sizes, races and ages in their most recent integrated branding campaign.  Dove skips the photoshopping portion of the editing process in ads and has a slew of events, charities, and messages etc. that affirm their “Campaign for Real Beauty.”

Dove, deliberately using the word "campaign" here, suggests that Dove is the initiator of this new found empowerment amongst women.  Is it the companies and actresses who began this “everyday woman” revolution of sorts? Or did the disenfranchised women unite first causing marketers and publicists to scramble to take advantage of this sentiment? Which came first?

The first suggestion, that this is a branding-spawned positioning effort, could mean that once the media has seen enough of this strategy, unachievable ideas of beauty might resurface in an attempt to stand out amongst the soon-to-be prolific messages of "real" beauty.  The second suggests that women are accepting the "skin they’re in" and changing the idea of beauty forever.