Essence: African American Women Care about Aging, Too

As the toiletries and cosmetics advertising category has grown - seeing a 16 percent increase through May 2006 compared to the same period last year - advertisers have had to become better marketers to cut through the clutter, and Essence and Allure magazines have released new research to help advertisers reach both mass and targeted consumers, Mediaweek writes.

Essence released a Smart Beauty study of nearly 2,000 African American women that sought to teach manufacturers how to court that demographic. Allure released its annual Catalyst Report that surveyed 1,000 women - with a pool that mirrored the composition of the U.S. Census - to show manufacturers how women shop for beauty products and how they resond to ads, the article says.

Some of the points advertisers are meant to glean from the studies include the fact African American women are interested in stopping the effects of aging. “The myth is that women of color don’t care about aging,” Michelle Ebanks, president of Essence, is quoted as saying. “We don’t wrinkle as early, but we care about it.”

Ebanks noted that African American titles get fewer ads from anti-aging products, especially from luxury skincare lines. “The mass skincare marketers are speaking directly to women of color,” she says. “Masstige skincare companies are not.” (President-CEO of ‘Black Enterprise’ magazine recently claimed that the advertising industry is “licensed to practice racism,” and has called for activism aimed at increasing the number of marketing dollars spent with black-owned media.)

Another point of the surveys is that word-of-mouth is a powerful tool for promoting beauty products, and that friends may sell better than celebrities. Marketers, then, may want to rethink the use of celebrities in print ads, the article points out, saying that most respondents in the Allure survey bought products based on special occasion, samples, magazine articles, or recommendations from friends or family rather than from celebrity plugs.

Language, too, is important, according to both studies, which pointed out that some words resonated more with women than others. The Smart Beauty study participants responded well to words emphasizing natural or health benefits, as well as to words that described their skin tone in “flavors” such as honey, mocha and chocolate rather than light, medium or beige. Allure’s Catalyst Report showed that respondents liked the words “natural” and “pretty” more than “sexy” and “glamorous.”