Questions:

1. How do consumers’ preferences for cosmetics and beauty care vary from country to country?

2. Select one cosmetics company and asses its strategy for a single country/region such as France, China etc. What is the best positioning strategy for it?

3. Is the advertising of cosmetics demeaning to women or is it promoting the fairness cream in a way not too different from how most cosmetics are promoted?

Cosmetics advertisement is also called beauty advertisement for a good reason. It indeed gives almost always the same message “Use this product A to look like this beautiful women, who actually use the product A”. To put it in a simple way, the commercials says to society “beauty looks like this”.

What is the consequence on women looking at these ads? A study from the YWCA (Young Women Christian Association) which is the largest organization promoting women rights, gave these results in 2002:

- Women are pressurized to meet idealized beauty standards. The cosmetics ads also called “beauty ads” are accepted unconsciously to be the standard of beauty.

- Dissafaction of women own appearance. This is advertisement aims exactly at this feeling to create the demand of their product.

- Most of women buy cosmetics to reach the standards. - Unrealistic standards. Fake advertising because the women portrayed is supposed to have

used the product. However most of the ads have been heavily photoshopped and don’t correspond to reality anymore.

However not all cosmetics ads use the same principles, some other encourage the consumers to perceive their own natural beauty. We can quote for example Dove’s Choose Beautiful campaign which started from a survey on 3000 women from 10 countries and found that only 2% of them considered themselves as beautiful.

Fairness cream or whitening cream is a cream used to whiten the skin. Most of countries in Asia like Thailand, India and China believe strongly that white skin is more beautiful and purer. For most of these countries the beliefs were also true hundreds of years ago. Today in some countries like India or Thailand, it has led to physical and racial discrimination in favor of the whitest skins.

Whitening cream commercials not only promote arbibeauty of white skin like other we saw before for usual cosmetics ads but it uses the already present hierarchical racial difference in society to promote their product unethically

These issues about marketing manipulating our needs and desires enlighten a larger problem about values as important as honesty and equality being more and more replaced by the consumer society rules.