Turning Sour Grapes into Lemonade
Flo vs Laura Geller, AI is not eco-friendly & emotional support handbags
The OG makeup brand Laura Geller got a cease-and-desist letter from Progressive insurance over a campaign, and are flipping it into a GWP promo.
Reported in the Glossy, this campaign is a take on the “Don’t Turn into Your Parents” but instead focuses on a guru helping women to accept their age.
Because parody and satire are a form of free speech, their legal counsel was unconcerned so instead of yanking the campaign, they posted this offer to send a free lipstick nad mirror to any Progressive policy holder. 73% of the followers voted YES to the collab, BTW.
What’s more impressive: This beauty brand is willing to out their own age, calling themselves a niche brand from the 90s. They are still standing - a lot like their customer base. They never got huge, they didn’t give up. This, friends, is midlife wisdom as brand activation.
I didn’t realize they are positioned as an openly a “mature” makeup brand now. In a GenZ obsessed world, that takes more guts than ignoring the Progressive lawyers. Mature makeup lines are one of those positions that always has been a need but has never worked because women have not wanted to identify as (gasp) middle age or “mature” code word old.
Funny that Progressive, after satirizing so many things over the years AND subjecting us to 16 years of Flo, got this petty about a small makeup brand’s youtube video.
Related:
Liked this feature on what a mid-40s faces without work look like, female and male. Further: Self is still around! Though probably not in print?
Further:
These Love Island castmates got called out for fillers.
Injection normalization can make everyone look like they are trying to not look 45+ whether they are 48 in the pursuit of looking 38 or 25 in pursuit of hotness. Yet if they’re happier, so be it.
You Read it Here First, Folks!
Just saying: Rebecca Traister wrote a great piece on the Republican women makeover/gender squeeze - which I wrote about, in far less depth, in March and May. See also: my JLo takes. 👇👇👇👇👇
Is this Handbag Classified as a Vegetable?
Tomato is the fragrance of the summer and the Tiktok “___ Girl Summer” so I guess that’s why Kate Spade is doing a collab with Heinz. 1
AI, also enemy of sustainability
Can you maintain your sustainable brand cred while cranking out energy-intensive product that the world doesn’t need?2
Baggu is getting blasted for its hot-as-hell collab with Collina Strada. Both identify as sustainable, but some have issues:
(1) Because the patterns were proudly AI-generated
(2) Because AI is an energy vampire
(3) Because Baggu has pushed eco friendly since its earliest day when it was about reusable bags not its current positioning:
BAGGU makes simple, playful things for everyday living.
Others have no issues except the drop selling out:
Even the author quotes a colleague saying:
While she says, “Of course you don’t need it (don’t be silly),” she recommends it
My concern is not the eco sell-out. It’s the notion that perhaps some people need to wear stuffed animals around to get through life.
Supposedly 40% of adults still sleep with a stuffy. And 65% of Squishmallow buyers are 18-24.
The melted print is also giving me Velveteen Rabbit callbacks, which may be intentional meta-commentary. What is REAL? 3
Related:
Do female AI voices bug you? Are they reinforcing harmful stereotypes of women as perky service providers?
Worth reading, at least for the AI voice samples.
I never realized how much Scarlett Johannsen’s Her tone and inflection sounded like the way I fake-talked as a cocktail waitress in college.4
Finally: If only more positioning statements could be so spot-on and useful:
The Week’s Marketing Takeaways:
Sustainable is in a positioning flux, which I will be looking at deeper in a future post.
AI as noisy novelty feature is unnecessary due to rapid proliferation. It likely creates only unforced brand friction at this point.
I’m the rare american who hates ketchup but some of the packet motifs are cute.
Of course, I myself have helped market countless products in the same lane
Goal: to jack up my tips. It worked.