Facial Cleansers For Every Age

From the shampoo on your hair to the nail polish on your toes, all kinds of beauty products have two separate and nearly unrelated forms of existence. First, they are all the product of a laboratory. Second, they are all the product of a marketing team. As a result, it is surprisingly difficult to determine, for example, which is the best facial cleanser.

The laboratory is actually not where grand new ideas usually come from. Usually, those product ideas start in the marketing department. There an army of very smart people spend 80 hour a weeks dissecting endless piles of research, trying to understand what women want.. When that research produces a gap between what the market wants and what is already available, they send that need to the laboratory.

There is also a second army inside beauty industry marketing departments, which keeps tabs on the competition. f a new berry is discovered in some remote part of Cambodia and a natural product derived from it blows up, the marketers will need a product made from that berry. If they discover that a competitor found a gap in the market that they missed, they will demand that the laboratory give them one to answer with.

The efforts of the marketing departments yield a never-ending product development pipeline in the laboratory. For example, when microdermabrasion became popular, beauty product companies rushed to produce products that would emulate the results. That creates tremendous opportunity for research and development.

Some might question whether all that research and development actually bears fruit. There are, for example, numerous products on the market that claim to improve the appearance of stretch marks. Women who have given birth or lost a lot of weight spend millions of dollars on these products annually, even though their effects are highly debatable.

Regardless of whether the product works, or is a breakthrough, or even contains the magic ingredient that was just discovered in the Amazon, the real magic of the beauty product industry happens when it comes back to the marketers. Having defined who wants it and what they like, the marketing people take their new product to the advertising people. The advertising people take it to the market.

And they sell it. Selling it has very little to do with the real merits of the product. It has everything to do with making a connection with the kind of person who is likely to buy it. When marketers realized that younger women preferred fruity-scented shampoos, for example, one company used a legendary advertising campaign featuring women showering in the throes of ecstasy to propel their product to hundred-million-dollar sales in its first year.

Bear this in mind the next time you find yourself standing in the beauty products section of your local grocery store, looking for the best facial cleanser, or toenail polish, or shampoo. The best one for you may not be the best one for someone else. To find your own best, don't trust the hype. Do your own research.