Image via invogue
Picture a group of 8-year-old girls running around in wobbly high heels, dripping in costume jewelry and perfume, wearing sequined belts around their heads. For nearly every woman (and, let’s be modern, maybe a few men) dress up was a major childhood preoccupation. Sneaking into the makeup cabinet, insisting on carrying a purse, begging to wear perfume. Putting together pieces and parts, playing at being women.
In the beauty and fashion industry, we often still operate on that same assumption. That these things – lipstick, jewelry, perfume – add up to make a woman. It might reach our consumer… if they were 8-years-old, or if this were still 1980 (we remember Robert Palmer). But they aren’t and it isn’t. Lately, the sum of our fashion and beauty parts isn’t adding up the way it used to.
Lately, the fashion and beauty brands working in our beautylab sessions are identifying a common need. They are all searching for that intangible something that makes women instinctively gravitate toward a product – authenticity. They are beginning to realize that in the same way patent leather heels and an It Bag can never combine to create a woman, spokesmodels and trumped-up benefit claims will never add up to create an authentic brand.
Diane Von Furstenberg is a woman who truly understands how to cultivate the power of empathetic authenticity. Over the course of her career she has remained true to her timeless core sensibilities of intelligence and empowered sexuality. She says, “You can no longer just count on your beauty or on your seduction power… I always joke and say that it is time to become a myth! Meaning, stand for something.”
Stand for something.
It’s not enough to push product – 20% more big red SEXY, now with twice the vito-minerals. You have to find the soul of your brand by empathizing with your consumer’s emotional needs. Only then can you reposition your brand or create a product that enables her to feel empowered by her femininity, not defined by it.
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