Coty repositions color cosmetics brand CoverGirl
The brand’s new mission officially launches today. Though Coty has, for some time now, been actively updating the brand’s place and face in the market and getting creative about the way CoverGirl engages consumers, as Cosmetics Design pointed out last month.
This summer CoverGirl took to the streets with a campaign called #ProjectPDA. PDA here stands for ‘public displays of application’, and the idea was to “[celebrate] the many ways women use makeup to represent themselves – however, whenever, and wherever they choose,” Ukonwa Ojo, global SVP of Cover Girl, told the press.
More recently the brand has named several new spokes people, including Ayesha Curry, Issa Rae, Katy Perry, Massy Arias, Maye Musk, and Shelina Moreda. And then there was Coty’s retail project with the Story concept shop in New York City. That project closed earlier this week but likely served as a test case for the brand’s new retail strategy.
Big picture
CoverGirl will be advancing the new brand mission through the end of 2017 and into 2018, according to a Coty press release about the color brand’s relaunch.
Giving a top-level description of the new brand identity, Laurent Kleitman, president of Coty Consumer Beauty, says “The new COVERGIRL positioning is an important example of Coty’s purpose to celebrate and liberate the diversity of beauty. Beauty should make people happy, and when we champion individuality and self-expression, that’s when we see its true power.”
And he goes on to say that “We believe this new mission will resonate with millions of people who feel overlooked by the beauty industry today. COVERGIRL has a huge opportunity to make a difference and we are confident our vision will translate into growth potential for the business.”
Moving image
A film out today entitled Made in the Mirror marks the start of the new CoverGirl brand identity. But as Ukonwa Ojo, SVP of CoverGirl, explains, the rebrand is intended to be about more than marketing collateral: “This is bigger than a new campaign or a tagline," she says. “We hope to spark a provocative dialogue that shifts cultural assumptions about when, where, how and why people wear makeup.”
She looks back at the work behind the project, explaining that “in leading the relaunch, we started with the insight that people no longer strive for a singular standard of beauty, but use makeup as a tool for self-expression and personal transformation. CoverGirl has always been inclusive and is known for pushing the boundaries of what it means to be beautiful, which means we have a responsibility to elevate how we connect and communicate with people.”
