Things seem to be improving for Cover Girl.
It’s been a tough time for the mass legacy brand. After a sale from Procter & Gamble to Coty, it has struggled to stay relevant at a time when young consumers are discovering new brands on social media and buying makeup outside of its main distribution channels, pharmacies and retail. large distribution. A new high-profile branding in 2018 aimed at attracting Millennials and Gen Z consumers was deemed more or less a flop by Wall Street, and sales have failed to rebound.
But with CEO Sue Y. Nabi at the helm, it’s a new day at Coty, and the company is confident that 2021 will finally be Cover Girl’s time to shine. Even before Nabi joined Nabi, executives were working hard to change the brand, a scaled-down Cover Girl that focuses on easy, natural makeup looks and “clean” formulations. The latest launch is LashBlast Clean, a vegan iteration of the brand’s popular LashBlast mascara.
Here Andrew Stanleick, Coty’s executive vice president for the Americas, talks about his plans for the brand.
How’s Cover Girl?
Andrew Stanleick: Cover Girl is 60 years old, an absolutely national treasure. It is a highly regarded brand – we are still number one with the brand part [targeted at older consumers], Simply Ageless Foundation. But with this new product – the Cover Girl Clean Fresh, which is that gorgeous, clean, vegan, cruelty-free range of foundations – that we launched earlier this year, we’ve brought this young client into the brand. . We probably hadn’t had this dialogue and engaged with [that consumer] So in recent years, it’s been wonderful to overindex on Gen Z… and to attract consumers of different races and ages. We have just looked at the recent data and we are [overindexing] 135% on Hispanics, which is a very large share of the market.
We have a wonderful brand, which maybe hasn’t received the right support and love… it hasn’t been targeted. What we’ve been doing is really going back, rather than trying to be a brand that we’re not. We went back to our foundations and the brand’s DNA. That’s really what Clean Fresh was – where the turnaround started and where we saw growth.
Cover Girl Clean Fresh is the first clean, mass, vegan, cruelty-free [makeup line] at the mass scale. when we [originally] launched Cover Girl 59 years ago, it was the first clean foundation – it was combined with Noxema to create an antibacterial [formula]. Launch of Clean Fresh earlier in the year, [we saw] that more and more consumers are looking for this kind of [makeup]. So [it appealed to our core] and for the first time in several years, it allowed us to talk to Gen Z consumers.
Do you think the future of Cover Girl is to clean the entire product line?
LIKE: The overall concept of cleanliness is something more and more consumers are looking for and retailers are asking for. This is something you will continue to see Coty’s innovation on. On Cover Girl, in particular, there’s a lot more to come. In the short term, our brand will not suddenly be [entirely] clean overnight, but over time we will bring, where possible, clean and sustainable ingredients.
Were there elements from the initial relaunch that worked that you have retained in the current iteration of the brand?
LIKE: We come back to basics. The post-merger recovery, one might say, was rushed. The brand had been in decline for some time. Brands that worked well [then, at mass] and taking off on Instagram was aimed at a consumer, a trend… that was not what Cover Girl stood for. We have tried something that we are not. We want to start producing clean products that work on a large scale again, instead of offering Instagram looks that require 30, 40 products to be perfect. People don’t really have time for that, so we want to start coming up with solutions again.
The initial relaunch spoke very openly about diversity and inclusiveness. How do you integrate these elements into the new program?
LIKE: Diversity has always been a part of Cover Girl’s story – it wasn’t a new leaf we turned with the rebranding, but part of the legacy we have. [During] the relaunch, we added a number of diverse spokespersons, which we are always proud to have [as members] from the Cover Girl team.
Looking at the Nielsen [scanner] numbers, it looks like all the big mass makeup brands are down. How problematic is brick and mortar retail for the category right now?
LIKE: The mass channel has been depressed but is slowly recovering. We have seen tremendous growth online. On Amazon Prime Day, Amazon increased 60% and I think Cover Girl increased 112%. We’re seeing the same trend online with other retailers, especially Target – online across all of our divisions and all of our products is really picking up, and it’s month to month.
