As each generation ages, so do attitudes about how to regard aging, and what “anti-aging” products and treatments really represent.
Cover Girl’s brand and positioning “makeover” with a new campaign line, “I Am What I Make Up,” is a sign of how this is playing out. “Easy, Breezy, Beautiful” is now history, as the brand focused less on addressing a narrower range of customers and goes with an “all-inclusive” approach that they expect will allow them to connect with a broader audience. That includes older consumers, which is why one of their “Cover Girls” is Maye Musk, 69 years young.
Walking a Tightrope With Consumers
For beauty and cosmetics companies, how they address this older audience is a bit of a tightrope-walking act. According to recent figures, women over 50 spend about $3-4 billion on cosmetics and toiletries, making up about 40% of the total market, and a large share of their money goes toward anti-aging products.
The numbers of older women are growing, naturally, and they represent a wide range of attitudes about how to tackle aging: Some want to retain every possible vestige of youth, while others intend to embrace and even exalt some of the effects of the passing years. Marketers can’t afford to alienate either camp.
Especially since a typical U.S. woman, according to recent research, will spend about $300,000 on cosmetics and beauty products over the course of a lifetime.
Some have begun to market what they term “pro-aging” products, claiming the beauty industry is “ageish” by its focus on dewy-faced youngsters. The companies know this backlash exists, which is why we’re seeing efforts like the Cover Girl re-launch where there’s emphasis on women from every age bracket.
Millennials, according to some researchers, have less interest in “future-proofing” their skin than the generation before, so the use of “anti-aging” as a selling point may lose traction as time goes on. Some of that may just be perception, however: a Millennial at 50 may find they’re just as interested in reducing wrinkles as their mother was, but won’t perceive it as “anti-aging.”
Diversity of marketing demands a diversity of product mix, so this will obviously create greater demands on formulators and product designers.
Regardless of the messaging around them, there are still product trends in anti-aging formulation that anti-pollution/environmental stress-fighting products, epigenetics-based products, plant and marine-based extracts that can lay claim to the “natural” badge, neuropeptides and more.
