Marketplace
Revlon - New Ads Depart From Celebrity Status Instead Use Four Not-So-Famous Models
By EMILY NELSON
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
 

A new magazine ad for Revlon features a woman on a stock exchange trading floor and a caption reading: "On a bad day, there's always lipstick." In an upcoming TV spot, a woman checks her reflection in the frozen-food case at the supermarket while another rubs her teeth in a public bathroom, looking for lipstick smudges.

So much for glamour.

After more than a decade of relying on the unobtainable celebrity allure of Cindy Crawford to sell its cosmetics, Revlon Inc., is trying to modernize its image with a few laughs and universal truths about being a woman. The new ads, which start Monday on TV, replace Ms. Crawford with four relatively unknown models, marking a dramatic change in the way Revlon markets itself.
 
 

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The company, which set the standard for supermodel advertising, says it wants to get away from the celebrity formula because so many cosmetics makers now follow its lead. Sarah Michelle Gellar of television show "Buffy" promotes Maybelline, country singer Faith Hill does Cover Girl, and actor Milla Jovovich pitches L'Oreal. Revlon, which has used Cybill Shepherd and Oprah in the past, fears that with so much star power, women remember the ad but not the brand it promotes.

Besides, by showing celebrities in brassy poses, past Revlon ads conveyed a man's view of women, not a woman's, says Rosemarie Ryan, president of ad agency Kirshenbaum Bond & Partners, which designed the new campaign. The old Revlon woman, "she's not somebody you want to be like," explains Ms. Ryan. Women in focus groups have sometimes described the Revlon spokesmodel as "the woman who steals your boyfriend."

New advertising is a critical part of efforts to turn around the struggling cosmetics company controlled by New York financier Ronald Perelman. Revlon is heavily in debt and has posted nine consecutive quarterly losses. It also faces stiff competition. Its market share slipped to third place last year with a 17.2% share behind leader Maybelline, owned by L'Oréal USA Inc., which has a 18.9% share, and Procter & Gamble Co.'s Cover Girl brand, with an 18.3% share. What's more, cosmetics sold at drug stores, discount stores and supermarkets are in a rut, with overall sales rising just 4% to $3.6 billion last year, short of the typical yearly increase of about 10%, according A.C. Nielsen data cited by Revlon.

"Everyone's products are excellent," says Suzanne Grayson, president of Grayson Associates, a cosmetics consultancy. "The only thing that separates one company from another is image and price."

Revlon plans to spend about $90 million to advertise its brand this year, a 30% increase from last year, at a time when other companies are cutting advertising budgets. The company is betting that it can recover sales it lost last year when it slashed spending in its effort to clean house. Cosmetics are considered resilient during an economic downturn because women view a $9 lipstick as an affordable luxury even as they cut back on fancy clothes or vacations.

Still, Revlon's new strategy could prove risky. After all, conventional wisdom says that lipstick, blush and nail polish sell because women aspire to look more glamorous -- something Ms. Crawford certainly represented. But Revlon, with slipping market share, says it has no choice but to shake things up. "We were outdated," says Cheryl Vitali, executive vice president and head of the Revlon brand. Revlon's image was "stuck in the 1980s." Any Revlon ads will avoid its old formula of "a spokesperson, on screen, talking about a product," she says.

As part of the image makeover, Revlon won't mention the models by name, as it has in the past with Ms. Crawford. Nor will it revert to its recipe of celebrity photo, with her name in bold type, next to a photo of a Revlon product. "If the models become celebrities from the work, God bless them," a Revlon spokeswoman says. Revlon didn't advertise this year at the Academy Awards telecast, which had been the company's signature moment with Cindy Crawford. The company says the awards are pricey, not the best use of funds since they don't deliver the viewers they once did.

The new Revlon advertising airs next week on shows such as "Felicity," "Dawson's Creek" and "Will and Grace." The 30-second commercial is the first of what will be an entire branding campaign, including other TV spots as well as print ads that are currently being developed for inclusion in the June issues of magazines. Each ad will feature a new product. The first commercials promote Revlon's new line of lipstick, called Absolutely Fabulous.

To make its ad overhaul happen, last fall Revlon executives who were hired to help turn around the company simply shut down Revlon's in-house advertising agency, Tarlow Advertising, run by veteran Dick Tarlow, who was close to Mr. Perelman. It laid off Tarlow creative staff and, for the first time since the late 1980s, Revlon looked to Madison Avenue for fresh advertising.

For the Revlon audition, Kirshenbaum Bond, creators of the much-admired advertising for Target stores, held focus groups and also asked women to invite friends to their homes and let its managers ask questions. It wanted research to show Revlon it understood its customer -- and where its old image was losing her. Kirshenbaum Bond made a poster of icons who convey a more independent image of women: the "Sex and the City" actors, music group Destiny's Child, the Charlie's Angels movie, and clothing designer Stella McCartney -- and a video of interviews with stylish women. A committee of seven senior Revlon executives, which didn't include Mr. Perelman, picked Kirshenbaum Bond in late February.

It's not that Revlon didn't have its pick of beautiful women to use. In the five months since Revlon had said it would stop using Ms. Crawford, its offices were flooded with tapes and photos of young women seeking to be its next face. Meanwhile the industry buzzed with big-name actors and models said to be contenders for its next face, including Gisele Bundchen, Liv Tyler, and Academy Award nominee Kate Hudson. Ultimately, Richard Kirshenbaum, the agency's co-chairman, says that he picked the four relatively unknown models because "they're not just beautiful but they have to have a great personality."

Write to Emily Nelson at emily.nelson@wsj.com