The Natural Facelift (A Study in Marketing)

What if I told you: "I've created a product that would give you a facelift without botox, without fillers, without surgery or any other invasive procedure".

What if I told you: "I’ve surveyed this product on a number of women and 90% of them were elated – with a percentage of them saying they saw an improvement".

And what if I told you: "The secret ingredient in the product comes from the leaf of a tree native to the high Himalayan region of Nepal and that the Sherpas chew on this leaf every single day".

What if I told you: "This product is soon to be the hottest reverse-aging product on the shelves and will shortly be featured in beauty magazines".

What would you think? Be honest…

You’d be intrigued, right?

Firstly. You know me, you (hopefully) like me and trust me because you use the products I create, or because you’ve been following me on Facebook for a while, or have read some of the articles on my website, or because you have a friend who loves my products.

Secondly. 90% of women surveyed love the product and say they saw an improvement.

Thirdly. The secret ingredient in the product comes from a natural source and it is perfectly credible that this ingredient has only now been discovered by the Western world.

And finally. The product is about to be featured in beauty magazines.

Well… it’s time to come clean. The only non-surgical, non-invasive facelift I’ve created recently was a facelift to my website.

I do apologise. I dangled a carrot in front of you, teased you, even maybe got you believing that, somehow, I’d stumbled upon the answer to many women's prayers.

But why would I be so cruel and deceitful?

The reason is that I want to give you an example of the type of claims and statements that we see and read every single day, multiple times. The type of claims that are made by the media, bloggers and vloggers, and the beauty industry, in general.

I want to use this example to show you how to read between the lines when you read such a claim or what questions to ask someone should they make a claim to you.

So let’s get started. Let’s highlight the holes in my statements above.

Statement 1: What if I told you: "I've created a product that would give you a facelift without botox, without fillers, without surgery or any other invasive procedure”.

With this statement I’m playing on the fact that you know me as a creator and designer of luxury skincare products. You probably see me as an expert in my field – someone who knows what they’re talking about, someone who understands skincare ingredients. So you would assume I know what I’m talking about.

If you look at all the skincare statements and claims made around you, who’s making them? A doctor with a PhD, perhaps. But what’s their PhD in? If it’s in psychology it doesn’t make him less of a learned doctor but it doesn’t exactly qualify him to be making such radical skincare claims. But you’ll never know. In many claims the PhD is designed to give the claim more credibility because it has been made by a professional of high standing.

And what about a beauty blogger or vlogger, especially one with a large following? Beauty bloggers and vloggers spend their days testing numerous skincare products so surely they must know what they’re talking about. And if they have a large following, well that gives them added credence. But how much do beauty bloggers and vloggers know about EU Law and regulations surrounding skincare products? How versed are they in what can and cannot be put in a product or indeed how much of any ingredient is safe? To be honest, not a lot. It’s not up to them to know these things, they are expected to give their honest opinion, not judge if something is safe or legal.

What should you do?

Always look for more evidence.

Who else made similar/same claims. How many relevant skincare experts, e.g. skincare manufacturers or dermatologists or skincare researches, supported this claim?

Is there scientific research available to support that this product can naturally give you a facelift that smooths out wrinkles etc just as well as botox or the like?

Where can you find out how/where this product has been tested?

Statement 2: What if I told you: "I’ve surveyed this product on a number of women and 90% of them were elated – with a percentage of them saying they saw an improvement”.

With this statement I’m giving credibility to my product. Women have been testing the product and they have been surveyed. And a very high percentage of them (90%) were elated.

What questions should you ask here?

I would start by asking many women were in the survey and tested the product?

I could have given the product to 10 of my closest friends and family members, or even hand-picked some loyal customers; people who know me, like me and trust me.

Not only is this too small a number to use for testing a product and running a survey, but those taking part were hand-picked by me so they would, most likely, give a biased opinion because, like I said, they know me, like me, and trust me.

By stating that 90% of the women who tested the product were elated, it gives you the impression that the survey conducted considered a large part of the female population.

Compare the statement “90% of the women surveyed were elated” with “9 out of the 10 women surveyed were elated”. Which statement gives you more confidence in the survey and, as a result, in the product? It would be the first one, of course.

And what were these women elated about? That I’d created a new luxury product? That they’d been invited to be part of the survey? The statement is very vague here – there’s no way of knowing why these ladies were elated.

Now what about that improvement a number of the 90% surveyed women saw? The statement doesn’t say what improvement these women noticed. It could have been that they felt their skin was more hydrated after using the product or smoother. Hydration and smooth skin are nice to have and a lovely result of using a product but the product we are talking about here is about creating a natural facelift and feeling hydrated and having smooth skin after application is not exactly the top two criteria of such a product.

Again – you want to see specifics.

And how much of an improvement did these women see, assuming it was a relevant facelift-associated improvement? Well that simply isn’t stated. Did all their wrinkles miraculously disappear? Or did they think they saw a small reduction in wrinkles round one area of their face, such as their eyes?

Again no specifics are mentioned. The statement is purposely left vague so we can make our own conclusions and by inviting us to do so we create a positive belief for ourselves.

Also, how many of the 90% women surveyed noticed an improvement. It’s not mentioned. Was it all 90% (or all 9 of the 10 surveyed) or was it just 2?

Statement 3: And what if I told you: "The secret ingredient in the product comes from the leaf of a tree native to the high Himalayan region of Nepal and that the Sherpas chew on this leaf every single day”.

Surely this statement is perfectly fine. There are a lot of remote areas in the world where indigenous people live who have been using an ingredient on their skin or hair, or eating it, for decades, if not centuries, before the Western world discovers it.

For example, Argan Oil, produced from the kernels of the argan tree endemic to Morocco, has been valued by the Berber community for centuries because of their belief in its nutritive, cosmetic and numerous medicinal properties. They even refer to the argan tree as the “tree of life”. And yet Argan Oil has only been used in luxury skincare products in Western world in the last decade or so.

So this statement could be plausible, right?

Read the statement again.

Let me highlight the end of the statement: “Sherpas chew on this leaf every single day”. Why do Sherpas chew on this leaf every single day? The statement doesn’t elaborate and say they chew on it everyday because it keeps their skin looking young and reverses the signs of again. This miraculous leaf could have absolutely no properties linked with the attributes of a facelift. They could be chewing on this leaf to alleviate the effects of altitude sickness, similar to the cocoa leaf.

The statement is just left hanging and because it’s placed with other statements which refer to a natural facelift, you automatically assume that this leaf much contain properties attributable to a facelift.

I spotted an excellent example of this kind of hanging statement in an advertisement recently for a new anti-aging product developed by a large skincare brand. Their hanging statement referred to a specific wild animal rubbing against the raw ingredient which they include in their product. They didn’t state that the specific wild animal rubbed against this plant so it would reduce the number of wrinkles it had (that would be ridiculous, right?), they just made the statement during an ad about an anti-aging product and left it open to interpretation.

Statement 4: What if I told you: "This product is soon to be the hottest reverse-aging product on the shelves and will shortly be featured in beauty magazines”.

No doubt by now you’re starting to get a feel for these statements and how to pick them apart, right?

So what would you highlight in this statement?

Firstly, what is a reverse-aging product? I’ve never heard that phrase before. Is it a new type of beauty product? Does it do what it implies i.e. reverse wrinkles and all signs of aging? And how long does the effect last? And does this claim with scientific evidence which supports it?

This newly-coined phrase is recklessly inserted into the statement without any supporting explanation or scientific backup. Because of the way it is part of the sentence, being said to “soon to be he hottest reverse-aging product”, it implies that there are other reverse-aging products out there and that this is the latest development in skincare.

If “reverse-aging” is a newly coined phrase, and this is the only supposed reverse-aging product in the market, then naturally it’s going to be the “hottest” one of its kind.

I think another important question here to be asked would be what beauty magazines will this product shortly be featured in? Is it the top beauty magazines like Vogue, Allure, Elle etc? Or in magazines that you would have never heard of, maybe they’re magazines that are only sold in one country or an online magazine created by a blogger for her followers.

And what about the word “shortly”. It’s kind of vague and very subjective. Some people might think shortly is in the next month whereas others might think the next season. And we also need to question if the product will be actually featured at all because a word as vague as “shortly” doesn’t give any assurances, unlike “this product is going to be featured in the February edition of Vogue magazine…”

I hope by breaking up these statements and highlighting their shortcomings you’ll be able to spot many of the clever marketing techniques used to entice you to buy a skincare product.

Don’t get me wrong, marketing is important and all companies need to sell their products.

But there are companies which employ honest marketing and then there are others who use misleading marketing… I know which companies I’d prefer to buy from.