0

How Digital Environment Makes a Difference: A Case Study of Two CoverGirl’s
Marketing Campaigns
CCTP 753 Networked Economy
Ruizhong Li
Abstract
The rise of internet in the early 21st
initiates a media revolution. The emerging media not
only change the way people acquire information and make decision, but also change the
environment for companies to conduct marketing strategies. The transformation is most
typical in beauty industry. The digital environment drives beauty brands to focus on
internet rather than traditional print media. The paper conducts a case study on CoverGirls’
marketing strategies leveraging YouTube video bloggers to promote products, compared
with its earlier efforts of leveraging the magazine advertisements. With the comparing, the
paper present the difference brought by the digital environment on the beauty marketing of
CoverGirl.
Keywords
Digital environment, YouTube, video loggers, printed magazines, beauty brand

Introduction

Life is digital. Digital technologies have a profound influence on several aspects of
individual’s daily life: social relations, economic decisions and the production and
dissemination of knowledge. Major changes have been wrought by the introduction of
online platforms over the past decades. 1
Wikipedia, iTunes, LinkedIn, Facebook, Reddit,
Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr, Spotify, Instagram, Pinterest and Google+ successively
came on the market between 2001 and 2011. In essential, what these platforms have in
common is to provide an online social network environment for people to communicate,
to exchange knowledge, to share ideas, and to create communities. As people are
increasingly becoming digital data subjects, many companies start to tailor their marketing
strategies to accommodate the digital environment. The new influencer, the social network
platforms have been leveraged as a market tool by companies in numerous industries. The
tremendous changes happening in the beauty industry is intriguing, because consumers’
decision-making mechanism in purchasing beauty products is always a mystery to
marketers. Beauty business is complex because it deals with the female-dominated
consumer group and it encompasses social issues related to females. The beauty brand
marketing is susceptible to and reflects the social identity of females, in turn, it shapes the
social perceptions of females. In the past, the traditional way for marketing is to advertise
in printed periodical magazines. In recent years, the triumph of the beauty content creators

1
Lupton, Deborah. Digital Sociology. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2014.

on the YouTube catch marketers’ eyes and gives a hint to marketers to harness not only the
YouTube platform but also the well-known video bloggers in brand marketing strategies.
CoverGirl, the beauty brand founded in 1961, is a forerunner in adjusting its marketing
strategies to the digital platform. The case study compares the marketing strategies in two
campaigns introduced by CoverGirl: launching Clean Make-up campaign in magazine and
cooperating with Ingrid Nilsen on YouTube. Magazine and YouTube, both are competitive
advertising arenas. One was launched in 1968, naming Cybill Shepherd, an early winner
of the contest "Model of the Year" sponsored by CoverGirl, as the visual representative for
the Clean Make-up campaign. Another was executed more recently in 2014, having the
beauty content creator Ingrid Nilsen, who has 4 million subscribers on her YouTube
channel, as the Glambassador of the brand. Although there is nearly half century between
the two campaigns, we can still make a meaningful comparative analysis between them.
The analysis aims to answer the research questions:
1. What are the similarities and differences between the effort made by CoverGirl in
two campaigns?
2. What are the influencers making the differences between the two campaigns, and
how the influencers work?
3. What difference will digital environment make and how?
To answer the question, there are three hypotheses:

1. From the angle of CoverGirl, the institutions on beauty industry and females, the
social structure CoverGirl embedded in, and the strategic action fields that
CoverGirl enters are the main influencers of the design of campaigns.
2. From the angle of consumers, the inherited bounded rationality, the social identity
of females, and the social network that they are embedded in are the main
influencers of how consumers respond to and interact with the campaigns.
3. The digitalized trending changes the way how these influencers exert their
influences on the campaigns’ design and consumers’ responses.
The paper devotes four parts to discussing these questions:
Part 1: constructing theoretical framework;
Part 1: depicting two campaigns;
Part 3: analyzing the two campaigns within the theoretical framework;
Part 4: conclusion and potential research.
The theoretical framework part is constructed to explain why CoverGirl design the
campaign in a certain pattern, and why consumers respond to and interact with the
campaign in a certain way. Observing from company perspective, the framework explores
the influencers of the decision-making of beauty product marketing campaign: the choice
of the original concept, the spokesmen, the marketing tool and the format, the advertising
verbal and visual rhetoric, and external assistance outside the organization. Starting from

consumer side, the framework deals with the reason why consumers are influenced by the
campaign: their inherited bounded rationality, their susceptiveness to the social norms and
identity on beauty, females, and the relationship between beauty and females, and their
awareness to the social relation and structure that they are embedded in. The theoretical
framework lists all the influencers that have bearing upon the behaviors of both CoverGirl
and consumers in two cases, and emphasizes on how digitalized trend of the society
changes the way that these influencers exert influence on the behaviors of company and
consumers in the two campaigns.
The depiction part firstly depicts the digitalized trend of the marketing strategies of the
beauty brands and the online communication and purchasing behaviors of consumers. The
data visualization will be displayed in the appendix, which highlights the triumph of the
beauty content creators on YouTube, compares the performance of top 25 brand channels
with top 25 beauty content creators in several metrics like subscribers, the total views, the
number of videos, and the engagement. The brief depiction of the triumph of beauty gurus
on YouTube justifies why CoverGirl launched the second campaign - the partnership with
Ingrid Nilsen. Secondly, attempting to emphasize on the change brought by digital
technologies, this part briefly depicts the social contexts of two campaigns, one excluding
the impact of digital technology and another highly depended on the digital environment,
and how digital technologies influence the latter. It delineates the difference between the
two campaigns in the concept, the spokesmen, the marketing tool and the format, the

advertising verbal and visual rhetoric, and external assistance outside the organization. It
also compares the interaction between brand and consumers in the two campaigns.
The analysis part explain how the influencers listed in the theoretical framework part
determine the all the aspects of CoverGirl’s campaign design in details, and how digital
environment changes the way these influencers make a difference on the design of
campaigns and the reaction of consumers. This part answers the following questions:
(1) What are the institutions on the topic of females and beauty industry in each era
and how they work?
(2) What social identity of females did CoverGirl aim to forge in the two campaigns
and how consumers perceive the identity?
(3) What kind of female community did CoverGirl create during the two campaigns
and how consumers behave in this community?
(4) How social relationship and interpersonal network influence the way people
acquire and interpret the information created by the campaigns?
(5) How digital environment influence the way people search for beauty product
information and the way people transfer even generate this information?
The conclusion part summarizes the main differences between the two campaign and the
influencers that make these differences. It also proposes the future of digital marketing
strategies in beauty industry and the obstacles.

Theoretical
Framework

The theoretical framework combined ideas from identity economics, behavioral economics,
social capital theory, field theory and institution theory, to examine CoverGirl’s effort in
marketing their beauty products, and to explain consumers’ response in two campaigns in
the networked economy.
The theoretical framework explains the behavioral mechanisms of two agents: CoverGirl,
the organization, and the consumer, as individual and as a part of the collective. In the
framework, emphasize the function of the digitalization
Organization
behavioral
mechanisms

First, the interdependent relationship between institutions and organizations shape the
behavior of organizations in economic activities. According to Douglass C. North, the
institutions are the rules of the game in a society and devised by human to reduce
uncertainty. Institutions make economic behaviors of agents more predictable and
potentially reduce the transaction cost. As Ronald Coase said in his “The Nature of the
Firm” (1937), when it is costly to transact, institutions matter. Institutions are created to
reduce the transaction cost by combining the repeating part in a trade into a stable structure.
However, establishing institutions are costly as well. The dilemma calls for the purposive

agents, organizations, to make the tradeoff. Organizations are groups of individuals bound
by some common purpose to achieve objectives; they are established to take advantage of
the opportunities provided within a given institutional framework. The institutions are not
necessary efficient for the organizations, and the stability of the institutions can either exert
positive or negative influence on the organizations. Moreover, technologies play a part in
influencing the potential gains of the organization in transactions. Technology provides
organizations with opportunities to alleviate the problem of information asymmetric, the
costliness of information and the opportunism. In turn, the process that organizations grab
the opportunities to accomplish their objectives is shaping how institutional framework
evolves as well. Therefore, the institutions only hold relatively stable in a certain social
context; in fact, they are changing incrementally when they are interacting with
organizations.
Second, the social capital that the organizations own: the social structure they are
embedded in and their ability of acquiring embedded resource determines their cooperative
partners and the way they cooperate. Social capital is the investment in social relations with
expected returns (Nan Lin, 1999). Organizations intend to acquire and leverage the
resources embedded in the social structure with their specific purpose. Therefore, their
activities are guided by this purpose to access to (1) the network source, the inherited
advantage brought by the network structure; and (2) the contact source, the mobilized
advantage brought by strategically connecting to the individual occupant who has occupied

certain power and source. To maintain the relationship needs continuous investment in
social networking. According to Andrew C. Inkpen and Eric W. K. Tsang, three dimensions
including structural dimension, cognitive dimension, and relational dimension, are used to
measure the effectiveness of the cooperation.
Third, the role, incumbents or challengers, that organizations play in a given strategic
action fields, influences whether they maintain the order or change the order. Strategic
action fields, which can be identified as organizational fields as well, are the fundamental
units of collective action in society (Neil Fligstein and Doug McAdam, 2012).
Organizations, the collective actors, and individuals in the strategic action field share basic
understandings about the field. There is no way to say that they share the same purpose.
They are attuned to the common logic of the field, the purposes of the field, relationships
to others in the field (including who has power and why), and the rules governing legitimate
action in the field. They are at an agreement of the relative stable status of the field. At the
same time, all collective actors, like organizations, hierarchically consist of subfields; the
dependence and interdependence between fields constitute one of the main sources of
change and stability in all fields. Moreover, the source of many of the opportunities and
challenges a given field faces stems from its relations with this broader environment.
Organizations can leverage these relations to change the power relations, the rewrite the
rules of the fields that they are in.

Therefore, the determinants of design of the campaigns to market beauty products include:
(1) marketing purpose of CoverGirl; (2) institutions on the beauty industry; and (3) the
available technology in that certain social context. In the networked economy, CoverGirl
needs to seek for cooperation within the social structure to maximize the utility of social
network. Put CoverGirl in strategic action field, it also attempts to establish its incumbent
role in the beauty industry, to stabilize the relationship between its subfields, the research
team and the market team, and to leverage the relationship with broader environment the
beauty product advertising field of printed magazine and YouTube platform, to reestablish
the rules, in order to gain benefit from the rule made by itself in the field.
Consumer
behavioral
mechanisms

First, organizations leverage the bounded rationality of consumers to organize the
information appealing to consumers. Behavioral economics suggested that consumers base
their purchasing decisions on comparing one with another, which gives marketers a hint to
display comparative advantage in the strategies rather than or not limited to the introduction
of product itself. Consumers’ limited ability of searching information make them at
disadvantage in information asymmetry. The costliness of information drive consumers to
make decision in a cursory manner. Therefore, categorized and personalized market is
indispensable to help consumers get rid of the information overwhelmed status. Consumers
are susceptible to the social norms imprinted on themselves. The norms are relative stable

and always developed in a community. this community could be self-developed or created
by organizations with marketing purpose. With the consensus shared in a community
created by the organization, the behavior of consumers in this community are easier to
predict.
Diverse social identities of consumers expedite the employing of positioning strategies.
Catering to specific social category is the common strategy of marketing. Digitalized trend
makes this process of positioning more transparent and ubiquitous.
The social networks the consumers embedded in determine their sources of information.
In this case, friends, video bloggers, magazines, the information they perceive shape their
consuming decisions and behaviors.
The
Case:
Two
Campaigns
launched
by
CoverGirl

Digitalized
trend:
the
triumph
of
beauty
content
creators
on
YouTube

YouTube is radically transforming how consumers discover, use, and purchase beauty
products—and how beauty brands market online.2
The beauty category is a female-
dominated YouTube category. According to OpenSlate, 89.31% of viewership of makeup

2
“Beauty on YouTube 2015.” Accessed May 15, 2016. http://www.pixability.com/industry-studies/new-
beauty/.

and cosmetics category, and 85.29% of viewership of skin and nail care category comes
from females3
. At the same time, females are primary online consumers. Women account
for 85% of all consumer purchases, and 58% of total online spending.4
They love to do
research before shopping, and online information is an important source to them. 78% of
women in the US use the Internet for product information before making a purchase, and
33% research products and services online before buying offline.5
They are engaging,
susceptive and accessible. Women are more active online than men. According to Nielson,
116 million U.S. women were active on the Web in 2013, compared with 102 million
males.6
22% of women shop online at least once a day; 92% pass along information about
deals or finds to others; women have average 171 contacts in their email or mobile lists.7
They seek for a sense of community. 76% of females want to be part of a special or select
panel; 79% of women would try a product or service, and 80% would solidify their brand
loyalty if they are aware that the product or the service is female-friendly.8
Females are

3
“The Demographics of YouTube, in 5 Charts.” Digiday, April 24, 2015.
http://digiday.com/platforms/demographics-youtube-5-charts/.
4
“She-Conomy  » MARKETING TO WOMEN QUICK FACTS.” Accessed May 15, 2016. http://she-
conomy.com/report/marketing-to-women-quick-facts.
5
Walter, Ekaterina. “Top 30 Stats You Need to Know When Marketing to Women.” The Next Web, January
24, 2012. http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2012/01/24/the-top-30-stats-you-need-to-know-when-
marketing-to-women/.
6
“She-Conomy  » MARKETING TO WOMEN QUICK FACTS.” Accessed May 15, 2016. http://she-
conomy.com/report/marketing-to-women-quick-facts.
7
“Women in Their Digital Domain | Ogilvy & Mather.” Accessed May 15, 2016. http://www.ogilvy.com/On-
Our-Minds/Articles/digital_divas.aspx.
8
“Women’s Business Enterprise National Council - WBENC - Home.” WBENC. Accessed May 15, 2016.
http://www.wbenc.org/.

visually persuaded because visual content help females visualize themselves interacting
with a product. Females trust user-generated content, in particular, female shoppers
respond strongly to content shared by other women.9
Therefore, females’ preferences in beauty product purchasing justify the popularity of the
YouTube beauty community. YouTube has become a newly discovered competitive field
by beauty brand marketers.
The incumbents in the beauty category of YouTube field are the beauty content creators.
The beauty content creator group is one of the earliest and most powerful influencer on
YouTube. They are productive, broadly appealed, and highly interactive. Since 2007, when
Michelle Phan began posting beauty tutorials on YouTube, there has been a continuing
fervor among creators in the beauty category and presented an inevitable expanding trend
on YouTube. In 2010, beauty-related content on YouTube averaged 300 million views per
month. In 2013, beauty-related content on YouTube grew to more than 700 million views
per month.  10

9
“Think Tank: Why Authenticity Matters for Female Shoppers.” Olapic | Visual Commerce Platform | Visual
Marketing Platform, April 21, 2016. http://www.olapic.com/why-authenticity-matters-female-
shoppers_blog-p1aw-g1lo-v1be/.
10
“Beauty on YouTube 2015. ” Accessed May 15, 2016. http://www.pixability.com/industry-studies/new-
beauty/.

Monthly views of beauty content on YouTube have increased over time from 200 million views
per month in September 2009 to 1.3 billion views in September 2014 to 1.6 billion views per
month as of March 2015.
11

Being credited as one of the first YouTube influencer, Michelle Phan was actually building
an entirely new profession: YouTube beauty guru.12
The beauty gurus on the YouTube are
users that create beauty content on the platform, owning a certain number of subscribers,
and being considered as experts in beauty. The average number of channel subscribers for
YouTube’s top 15 YouTube beauty video bloggers is 2.1 million, which speaks well for the

11
beauty/.
12
“7 Breakout YouTube Beauty Gurus To Follow Now.” Mediakix - Influencer Marketing Agency + Platform
for Brands, January 6, 2016. http://mediakix.com/2016/01/top-youtube-beauty-gurus-to-watch/.

enormous influence brought by the beauty gurus - the personal beauty content creators. As
of 2015, there are 182,621 beauty creator channels on the YouTube,13
generating most of
the beauty content views on the YouTube. Among 45.3 billion views generated by
1,783,935 beauty videos on YouTube, 20% resulting from channel subscribers for top 10
beauty video bloggers.14
It is ironic to find that beauty brands contribute little to the beauty feast on YouTube. In
2014, beauty content creators, not brands, controlled 97% of YouTube’s beauty content and
conversations; only 3% of YouTube beauty video views belonging to major brands. As
of April 2015, beauty creators on YouTube own 95.4% of the content within YouTube’s
beauty ecosystem.15
The brand channels fall behind in the number of channels. Only 215
beauty brands establish their YouTube channels, which generating 2.1 billion brand-owned
video views. There are 45,000 non-brand-affiliated YouTube channels specializing in
beauty topics.16
Although the earliest beauty brands that established their channels are
earlier actors enter into this field, but compared with the beauty content creators in all
dimensions including subscribers, the number of video, the total views, the engagement,

13
beauty/.
14
beauty/.
15
beauty/.
16
beauty/.

beauty brands are defeat by the beauty content creators.17
Regardless of the tremendous disparity in YouTube influence between beauty brands and
beauty content creators, beauty brands are increasing YouTube advertising spend to catch
up to creators. Views of YouTube videos which mention CoverGirl increased 170% to 805
million views. Ten of the top 25 most-viewed beauty videos published in the first four
months of 2015 were produced or sponsored by beauty brands – a new type of alliance
comes into being. Among these beauty brands, CoverGirl is not satisfied with the
temporary cooperation with the beauty gurus, it names Ingrid Nilsen as the brand
Glambassador in 2014, establishing a long term partnership. The new kind of spokesman
of beauty brand inspires my interest in comparing the traditional campaign with the newly
launched one. I cite the Clean Makeup campaign in 1968 here to be one of the case.
Clean
Makeup
Campaign:
blonde
strategy

In February 1968, a new campaign for Cover Girl, called "Clean Makeup," was introduced.
The essence of the Clean Makeup campaign was to replace the loss of antiseptic claims
with an assertion of cleanliness. 18
In 1960s, testimonial approach had become a universal
strategies employed in advertising. The endorsement from celebrities is a must-have

17
See Appendix A. The data sources are collected manually, and from the statistics from the Pixibility Report:
Beauty On YouTube 2015.
18
Scott, Linda M. “Classic Campaigns - Cover Girl Cosmetics: 1960-1990.” Advertising & Society Review 13,
no. 4 (2013). https://muse.jhu.edu/article/497056.

element in advertisement, “if you launch without a star, the industry thinks you have no
confidence in your product.” 19
Consumers were getting used to this trick, even getting a
little tired of the celebrity game. The research team held focus group discussions with
consumers, trying to find out a new concept catering to the demands of consumers. At that
time, people were increasingly concerned about the chemical ingredients added in the
beauty products, and this concern call for the “harm-free” promise from beauty brand.
Apart from the safety concern, importantly, a clean, “natural” look served as a rebellious
representation for a new generation of young women who were rejecting traditional gender
roles, getting rid of heavy disguise, and seeking greater honesty in social relationships. The
idea of Clean Makeup came along to meet the demand. Embraced almost seamlessly by
the consumers, the campaign was executed.
The concept of natural and clean was embodied in every details during the executing
process. The dominated marketing media in 1968 was magazine; a magazine advertisement
consists of verbal and visual rhetoric. The vocabularies employed in the magazine
advertisement in Clean Makeup campaign highly represent the core concept: “Natural”,
“Naturally”, “Clear”, “Cleanly”, “Fresh”, “Free”, these words repeatedly presented in the
advertising language. The natural and clean appearance is only the half of the story. The

19
Tungate, Mark. Branded Beauty: How Marketing Changed the Way We Look. 1st ed. Philadelphia, PA:
Kogan Page, 2011.

verbal part also emphasized the medication support from Noxzema, using words and
phrases like “Medicated”, “Medication”, “Healthy”, “Fight germ”, “Good for your skin”,
“Do healthy things for your skin” to tell the rest of the story about health and
medication. The visual image was the result of social norms; in 1960s, people related
blonde to the cleanliness. The campaign shaped a visual representation of “girl next door,”
a blue-eyed, blonde all-American image. Naming Cybill Shepherd as the spokesman for
the campaign was aligned with the concept. Except for the choice of spokesman, the
photography of the model maintained the consistency in pursuing the clean concept as well.
George Poris, who was on the team through 1968, recalled, “Once we did ‘Clean Makeup,’，
we had to get a look for it.” The background, the color, the facial expression, the pose –
everything reflected topic: natural and clean.
YouTube
Campaign:
a
cooperation
with
Ingrid
Nilsen

In July 2014, CoverGirl announced its cooperation with the beauty guru, Ingrid Nilsen.
The campaign launched in the observation of the digitalized trend of beauty marketing and
the triumph of beauty content creators on YouTube.
As mentioned before, the huge difference in influence between beauty brands and beauty
content creator on YouTube expedites the cooperation. Ingrid Nilsen, known as
missglomorazzi on the YouTube, whose YouTube channel possesses 20 times more

subscribers than CoverGirl’s.
The incumbent status of beauty gurus inspires CoverGirl to seek for alliance with them.
Compared with the Clean Makeup campaign, digitalized trend makes difference in the core
concept, marketing tool, and main actors between the two campaigns.
The core concept of the campaign, “natural and clean” in 1968 has been embedded in the

norms of the beauty industry, and is no longer a creative point of marketing. The digitalized
trend makes the core concept more random and scattered, because the producing circulation
of video is much shorter than magazine. The marketing tool is transferred from magazine
to video, which diversifies the topics of content to display and extends the space for both
verbal and visual content. The digitalized platform engages subscribers, the potential
consumers, into a positive part of marketing strategy. User-generated content is another
influencer emerged from the digital platform to exert influence on consumers’ decision
making. The digital platform also changes the relationship between spokesman and brands.
The former employment relationship is changed to the equal partnership, which leaves
beauty content creators certain freedom to innovate.
CoverGirl created a playlist for its Glambassador, Ingrid Nilsen in brand channel. The
playlist gathers all the videos that Ingrid Nilsen acted in, of course, in cooperation with
CoverGirl. Different from the former spokesman, which only served as visual
representation, Ingrid Nilsen brought the sources she has accumulated into the brand
channel, and her social network with her own subscribers into the interaction. The format
of cooperation is also flexible; Ingrid Nilsen bears the responsibility to promote the mobile
application developed by CoverGirl; to create tutorials in given topics, like Halloween
makeup, red carpet makeup, etc.; she involves in promoting the female campaign, GirlsCan,
held by CoverGirl. The diverse roles played by Ingrid Nilsen promotes the expectation of
the subscribers who attracted by her, but the lack of the stability weakens the social tie

between brands and Ingrid Nilsen, which may influence the direct benefit that brand can
acquire from the cooperation.
Analysis

The design of the both campaigns is the product of institutions, social capitals and fields.
These factors changes as time went by, the difference in the three factors lead to different
campaigns.
The definition of beauty and the symbol of beauty are the products of social norms, the
informal constraints. We can observe an obvious discrepancy between the core concepts of
two campaigns. Clean Makeup campaign regard “natural and clean” as a creative selling
point of the campaign, reflecting the established social norms on beauty industry and
females: decoration and disguise is the standard of beauty for females. The concept “natural”
was proposed to deal with this stereotype. The concept of “clean” was the reflection of
consumers’concern about the chemical additives. Indeed, the late 1960s and 1970s brought
a substantial demand for "natural" products in categories ranging from household cleansers
to processed food. Their concerns about the external fields like household and food are
expanded to the beauty fields. As time went by, “natural and clean” has been
institutionalized into the beauty industry. They are no longer regarded as a selling point. It
is embodied by CoverGirl’s slogan which was launched in 1997, “Easy, breezy, beautiful”.

The slogan suggests that the brand has integrated the pursuit of natural concept into its
spirit. The 30-year gap between 1968 and 1997 also indicates that it had taken decades for
the concept to become a shared understanding of brand CoverGirl. When it comes to the
digital age, the definition of beauty has been diversified and personalized. The digital
environment endows ordinary people with platform to present their thoughts and idea; it
expands the “rule maker” group to define beauty. There are so many definitions of beauty
that it is hard for CoverGirl to launch a single concept. Therefore, the acute observation of
the opinion representation – the beauty guru on YouTube helps solve the problem.
It leads to the second question that how to symbolized a certain kind of defined beauty in
certain social context. In digital environment, the social norms can be quantified. The
metrics, subscribers, views, engagements (comments, like or dislike, forwards), point to
embodiments where social norms of beauty are embedded - the popular beauty content
creator. Their popularity in essential is the result of gathering a large group with shared
understanding on beauty. Therefore, Ingrid Nilsen directly provides CoverGirl’s with not
only the visual representation displaying the concept given by CoverGirl, but also her self-
created ideas which have gathered wide agreement among her subscribers.
There is another obvious discrepancy between the spokesmen of two campaigns: one is all-
American blue-eyed blonde, and another is the hybrid of Norwegian and Thai. In the
history of female beauty in Western culture, “clean,” “blonde,” and “virtuous” are tied

closely together, much as, in American cultural history, there is a strong link between
blonde and clean. Therefore, using blonde model enhance the concept of clean by
connecting to the common understanding that blonde signifies clean. In the YouTube
campaign, Ingrid Nilsen is a hybrid of European and Asian descent, at the same time, she
is lesbian. The diversity of her personality is aligned to the concept of self-defined beauty.
And the inclusive attitude of different culture brings CoverGirl widespread reputation in
many social groups.
Except for bringing wide appeal to different social groups, the cooperation between
CoverGirl and Ingrid Nilsen also bring resources embedded in the network. The
cooperation can be considered as a strategic alliance. Unlike the contract between
spokesman and CoverGirl in 1968, the partnership between Ingrid Nilsen and CoverGirl is
nonhierarchical. The unit of economic activities on YouTube is a channel. Actors like
Ingrid Nilsen in this network has occupied enormous resources. First, 4 million subscribers
are a huge group of marketing targets. When Ingrid Nilsen cooperates with the brand to
shoot videos, the subscribers of Ingrid’s channel will be interested to view the cooperated
videos, which brings traffic to CoverGirl’s channel. The long term cooperation relationship
between brands and creator could also bring loyal audience to the brand channel. The
alliance is reciprocal. Ingrid has a chance to get in touch with more wide platform. Her
interview with Barack Obama in January is an evidence that she acquires benefit from the
cooperation. In the interview, her questions on tax on women’s sanitary product also

indicate her social image of female representative, which solidify her status in the beauty
industry, the female-dominated field.
Moreover, the bounded irrationality of consumers is influenced by the digital environment.
Digital environment changes the way people acquire and process information. When
people acquire information of product, the first thing they tend to do is to compare. In 1968,
when people read the magazine advertisement of CoverGirl, they felt that the new idea
grasped their heart, and they were not going to compare, especially when they are at the
disadvantage in acquiring information. The limited information they accessed to limited
the comparing behavior. However, the internet age accompanied with the explode of
information makes people be overwhelmed by the information. If marketing campaign can
help them make the compare, they are willing to be “cheated”. The cooperation with Ingrid
Nilsen on YouTube gets consumers trusted both the beauty guru and the users on the
platform. There is a distance between traditional celebrity and consumers. It is not the same
story between Ingrid Nilsen and consumers. She started her YouTube journey in 2009,
sharing her personal tips on beauty and lifestyle. It is a nonprofit activity and the
relationship established between Ingrid and subscribers is within the social norms. She is
another ordinary person to her subscribers. YouTube provides a platform for user-generated
content to play a part. Consumers are easily “trapped” in the conversation and information
exchange process, especially they are one of the contributors the conversation. There is no
way for them to deny the authenticity of the content generated in this context.

Conclusion

Digitalized trend is weakening the traditional stereotype on beauty industry and females,
and make it a more diversified and personalized field. It also makes marketing a more
complicated economic activity that it engages more actors in this activity.
CoverGirl notice the beauty gurus trend on the YouTube and has a good leverage on it. It
targets the institutions embedded in the community represented by beauty gurus, and finds
out the beauty gurus are not only the traditional spokesman, as a marketing tool, but also a
self-created actor. CoverGirl could catch up with what the consumers want by cooperating
with the beauty guru, to know what is going in this area. CoverGirl connects itself to Ingrid
Nilsen because she is a powerful node in the YouTube ecosystem network. Access to the
hub, it can share the embedded resources owned by the hub. For CoverGirl, the resources
are the traffic brought by Ingrid Nilsen, and the social reputation of inclusiveness. The
cooperation on the YouTube also involves users on the platform in the economic activity,
as positive actors. They can exert influence on other users, their response to the campaign
is also recorded to improve the campaign.
In conclusion, the differences between two campaigns emphasize the new characteristic of
beauty marketing brought by the digital environment. The digitalized trend inspires beauty

marketing to expand its field to YouTube, engages more actors in the game, and makes the
game more transparent and organic.

Appendix
A

Mean of Beauty Creators: 4828750.68
Mean of Beauty Brands: 234755.88

Mean of Beauty Brands: 1178240

Reference

1. Lupton, Deborah. Digital Sociology. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2014.
2. North, Douglass Cecil. Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic
Performance. The Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions. Cambridge;
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
3. Lin, Nan. "Building a network theory of social capital." Connections 22.1 (1999):
28-51.
4. Inkpen, Andrew C., and Eric W. K. Tsang. “Social Capital, Networks, and
Knowledge Transfer.” The Academy of Management Review 30, no. 1 (2005):
146–65. doi:10.2307/20159100.
5. Fligstein, Neil, and Doug McAdam. A theory of fields. Oxford University Press,
2012.
6. Ariely, Dan. Predictably irrational. New York: HarperCollins, 2008.
7. “Beauty on YouTube 2015.” Accessed May 15, 2016.
http://www.pixability.com/industry-studies/new-beauty/.
8. “The Demographics of YouTube, in 5 Charts.” Digiday, April 24, 2015.
http://digiday.com/platforms/demographics-youtube-5-charts/.
9. “She-Conomy  » MARKETING TO WOMEN QUICK FACTS.” Accessed May
15, 2016. http://she-conomy.com/report/marketing-to-women-quick-facts.
10. Walter, Ekaterina. “Top 30 Stats You Need to Know When Marketing to
Women.” The Next Web, January 24, 2012.
http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2012/01/24/the-top-30-stats-you-need-to-
know-when-marketing-to-women/.
11. “Women in Their Digital Domain | Ogilvy & Mather.” Accessed May 15, 2016.
http://www.ogilvy.com/On-Our-Minds/Articles/digital_divas.aspx.
12. “Women’s Business Enterprise National Council - WBENC - Home.” WBENC.
Accessed May 15, 2016. http://www.wbenc.org/.
13. “Think Tank: Why Authenticity Matters for Female Shoppers.” Olapic | Visual
Commerce Platform | Visual Marketing Platform, April 21, 2016.
http://www.olapic.com/why-authenticity-matters-female-shoppers_blog-p1aw-
g1lo-v1be/.
14. “7 Breakout YouTube Beauty Gurus To Follow Now.” Mediakix - Influencer
Marketing Agency + Platform for Brands, January 6, 2016.
http://mediakix.com/2016/01/top-youtube-beauty-gurus-to-watch/.
15. Scott, Linda M. “Classic Campaigns - Cover Girl Cosmetics: 1960-1990.”
Advertising & Society Review 13, no. 4 (2013).
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/497056.
16. Tungate, Mark. Branded Beauty: How Marketing Changed the Way We Look. 1st
ed. Philadelphia, PA: Kogan Page, 2011.

0

Recomendados

Recomendados

Más contenido relacionado

La actualidad más candente

La actualidad más candente (20)

Destacado

Destacado (18)

Similar a 0

Similar a 0 (20)

0