Self-esteem and market shareSelf-esteem and market share
The Body Shop has recently launched a very trendy, very clever advertising campaign. It's all about "self-esteem", defined in the slick campaign booklet as "self-authority, dignity, pride, awareness, calmness, the pursuit of dreams, a sense of achievement, a twinkle in the eye, the living of life."
"Slim, tall, young, cellulite-free, athletic and tanned. The world doesn't see beauty that way, marketeers see beauty that way", it says. "Hey media, where we come from, cultural and physical diversity is the norm. It's called planet earth."
The booklet contains useful and important information. It describes the myths and the reality of women's body weight, the horrendous incidence of eating disorders resulting from women's insecurity about their body image and how this is created and sustained by advertising.
This important message for women is one that generations of feminists have struggled to spread. The fact that it is now being promoted in thousands of Body Shop outlets is a good thing.
But why is a privately owned, transnational beauty product corporation, the principle aim of which is to make millions of dollars in sales every year, doing this? Surely there's a contradiction here.
The Body Shop answers with well-intentioned sounding evasions: "Does this help sell our moisturisers? Probably not. Does it help put wrinkles into perspective? Hopefully yes ... we have a greater obligation to our customers than simply tending to their looks." Very admirable.
Multimillionaire owner Anita Roddick says the Body Shop is "going to do some awareness-raising on behalf of self-esteem and self-authority. We will be challenging the cultural conceptions of femininity as portrayed in the 'beauty' industry ... We will encourage the celebration of the unique qualities that make each of us what we are. Self-esteem is truly the route to revolution."
This is a clever campaign. It rests on one very simple but successful marketing idea: that products and brands will be more saleable if consumers believe the manufacturer is more honest, more caring and more socially aware than its competitors.
The fact that the campaign is premised on the illusion that there are individual solutions to social problems is immaterial.
The campaign's core message, "Body Shop = socially responsible", is a direct appeal to the radical consciousness of a whole generation of young women who were raised by feminists from the women's liberation movement of the 1970s and have been deeply influenced by the mass marketing of feminism in books such as Naomi Wolf's Beauty Myth.
In another sphere of consumerism, this ideologically sound approach to marketing is called "green-washing". The majority of "green" products are equally environmentally damaging and equally, if not more, expensive (after all, it's worth paying that little bit more to help save the environment). But they sell because they make a direct appeal to the widespread environmental consciousness produced by the green movement of the 1970s and '80s.
By convincing women that they will avoid being duped, that they will have more control over their spending if they do it with "their eyes open" at the Body Shop rather than elsewhere, the company hopes to attract more sales.
For all its accurate critique of sexism in the beauty industry, however, the "self-esteem" campaign does not question that the majority of women will continue to spend money on skin, hair, nail and other "care" products of the type sold by the Body Shop (in fact, it doesn't say much at all about such products, concentrating instead on body size).
The campaign does not say, "Stop wasting your money"; it says, "Spend your money more wisely, with us". It does not say, "Buying products will not increase your self-esteem"; it says, "Buy self-esteem direct, from us".
This campaign is not about liberating women from the beauty product market. It is about competing more successfully for a bigger share of that market.
By Lisa Macdonald