What do you think of when you hear the word marketing?
When most people think about marketing, they might think of tactics like paid advertising via magazines, or television commercials, email marketing, or social media and influencer marketing. While the media landscape has changed over the years, brands typically follow a blueprint of how to 'successfully' market themselves in the modern landscape.
And part of that, is never talking publicly about their marketing practices!
We want to change that. We want to flip the script and empower women and men to feel good about themselves, not market to them (or even worse, at them).
This is something that our founder Sharon has been passionate about since first starting MV but continues to see today.
"Since the 1950s, women in particular have been heavily marketed to but right here, right now in 2023, this marketing is aggressive and relentless!" Sharon, MV founder.
So in this blog post we want to give you a look behind the MV curtain, and share more about how we're flipping the script on traditional marketing practices.
We want to empower, not exploit emotions
The commercial beauty industry is a powerful marketing machine and this is particularly the case for ageing - especially for women.
When it comes to the media's role in body image, research has found that "women are consistently persuaded of two important things: one that is undesirable to appear to be ageing; and two that they must assume responsibility to stay young-looking, or to disguise their apparent ageing."1
Sharon agrees, saying that "the commercial beauty industry can often make us feel 'less than;, that there's something wrong that needs to be corrected", and she has been outspoken about the use of the term 'anti-ageing' within the beauty industry going back more than three decades.
That's why you won't see us ever using the term anti-ageing (which is an oxymoron, by the way!) anywhere on our products or website.
Instead, we see ageing as a privilege, and our mission is to tell people the truth, break down the myths about ageing and empower people to embrace the beauty of ageing naturally - but with a decent sprinkle of style and attitude of course!
Word-of-mouth mentions, not influencer marketing
The world of blogging and social media has transformed marketing and advertising as we know it. And for the beauty industry which relies on visual advertising, these mediums have provided an extension to the large-scale celebrity driven glossy ads, allowing brands to leverage the power of word-of-mouth, authentic reviews from everyday people.
With the proliferation of Instagram and TikTok in particular, this has led to the rise of the influencer now a legitimate and highly profitable career.
Which has in turn led to the monetisation of feedback and reviews.
This initial word-of-mouth marketing approach has performed a full circle and is once again a paid promotion, just via a different channel. While there is nothing inherently wrong with this, it can sometimes be tricky for people to decipher whether a social media influencer is promotion a product because they genuinely like it, or simply because they were paid to do so.
At MV, we have a strict 'authentic feedback only' policy, whereby we never pay anyone to mention us or our products. So, if you ever see any MV content of feedback, you can be confident knowing that it is authentic (sidenote: we don't know of any other brand publicly making this pledge!).
Authentic celebrity endorsements, not manufactured reviews
This also applies to any celebrity reviews of MV!
We are equally thrilled and humbled whenever we hear a celebrity mention our brand, particularly as unlike others, we never pay a celebrity to mention or advertise our products.
One of the reasons for this is our advertising budget, as we prefer to spend our money on the acquisition of luxury and therapeutic ingredients instead.
But our decision not to pay celebrities goes much, much deeper.
We pride ourselves on being honest, transparent and authentic in everything we do: from creating every single product in-house to have full control over our unique (and time-consuming) small-batch manufacturing process; to using fewer ingredients, at higher concentrations, for maximum efficacy and not using a multitude of ingredients to simply boost marketing claims; to a thoughtfully curated product range with multi-use products; to relying on genuine and organic feedback including all our celebrity reviews!
So when a celebrity MV fan mentions our brand, it holds special meaning for us, and we hope now it does for you too (you can look at what some of our celebrity fans like Emma Watson and Maggie Gyllenhaal have said about us in various interviews and platforms here).
At MV, we want to flip the script on beauty marketing. Unlike other brands, we rely on traditional organic marketing, and customer reviews and recommendations hold the most special meaning for us of all because they come from you, our loyal customers - our real VIP's. We love when our customers tell their family and friends about us and leave a review, as they help others discover our brand and find their perfect product match!
While some may say our marketing approach is 'wrong' because it doesn't follow traditional marketing foundations or principles, to that we say - if our marketing approach is wrong, well then, we don't want to be right!
- Coupland, J. (2003), ‘Ageist Ideology and Discourses of Control in Skincare Product Marketing’, in: Coupland, J. and Gwyn, R. (eds), Discourse, the body, and identity, Palgrave Macmillan, NY, p. 128
