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The wealthy, image-conscious females of the Middle East – and particularly the Gulf, where shopping appears to be the national pastime – represent an ideal target for pushers of cosmetics and personal products. So why aren’t marketers speaking to them?

In the GCC, per capita spend on beauty and personal-care products is around $340, one of the highest rates in the world. In the region as a whole, consumption of beauty products probably cleared $2.1 billion in 2006, an increase of 12 percent over 2005, according to the most recently available estimate from market researcher Euromonitor.

Emirati women alone spend one billion dirhams per year on beauty products, according to IQPC Middle East, one of the organizers of this month’s Beauty and Body Marketing Middle East.

But the region’s advertising gurus say beauty brand owners – particularly multinationals – are failing to fully capitalize on the potential for regional growth. Too often, they say, brands fail to address Middle Eastern women – instead importing Western ads and attitudes and relying on the strength of their brands’ international reputations.

“The problem is: [Beauty ads are] all starting to look the same,” says Dani Richa, Impact BBDO’s chief creative officer for the MENA region. “Ninety percent of the time, it’s just a face. So when you flip through a magazine, either you’re caught by the face or not. There’s nothing more to it. To the point where the brands are almost interchangeable.”

It’s a point we hear repeated several times: When everyone’s using the same execution, how do you differentiate your brand? That’s probably what led the big brands to use celebrities, Richa says. But these days, even that tactic isn’t recommended.

“Consumers are sophisticated today,” he says. “If you’re talking to someone in their mid-thirties, they’ve been exposed to similar ads for the last 20 years. So I really question its effectiveness.”

Beauty marketers need to work harder to stand out from the crowd, says Manoj Ammanath, creative director of Brandcom Middle East, which handles the creative for local cosmetic and fragrance brand Mikyajy. “I wish – and I hope – that women could actually tell one brand from another when they walk into a store,” he says. “Because it’s all one blind spot, you know? I see Lancome, I see Clinique, I see something else… I don’t know who told me what.”

NAÏVE AND SUPERFICIAL
The beauty category is riddled with clichés, says Moneer Barakat, creative director of Memac Ogilvy, Dubai. “All the ads are almost the same,” he says. “There’s always this Lebanese or European-looking woman being portrayed as the reference of beauty. And the implication is: If you use the product you will end up looking like this, or similar to this.

“I know it can be a winning formula, but it’s a bit naïve, because it addresses women at a very superficial level and it doesn’t celebrate the difference between women. It’s like it’s trying to create this standard cosmopolitan kind of reference.

“I would love to see some different attitudes in beauty advertising in the Middle East,” Barakat continues. “There’s really just one, which is: Let’s all look glamorous. Sometimes it’s being done using celebrities; sometimes it’s being done using a stunning Lebanese or European woman. And it makes it amazingly difficult to differentiate the products.

“Unfortunately a lot of the brands and a lot of my advertising colleagues have fallen into the trap of not experimenting and not trying to do something fresh and different and interesting.”

ACT LOCAL?
Elias Kanakry, account manager at Saatchi and Saatchi, Dubai, which handles Olay, says all too often brands just don’t want to spend the money on a regional campaign when they already have ads from abroad they think will work in the Middle East.

“A lot of what we see in print and on TV is being adapted from international work, whether they localize it or run it as is,” he says. “Sometimes it’s because the client wants to save money, or they don’t have the budget. But we think it’s really important for us to do something creative and nice that’s appealing to women in this part of the world. Because whatever’s being done outside might not be appealing for our target here.”

Ammanath believes brands that rely on international adaptations are failing to speak to regional women on their own terms. “I find these global advertising guidelines often don’t allow for good regional insights. You know, get these guidelines, get some women, Photoshop them. In most cases, overdo it, so they come out looking like Charlie’s Angels,” he says. “Very plastic, mannequin-like women and some big branding and that’s it.”

Richa argues that global campaigns make sense, on one level. So many people now have access to international media that if brands aren’t consistent in their communications, consumers can become confused about what they stand for.

“It only works, though, when you start off with something that’s fresh and new,” Richa says. “There’s no problem being consistent. But if you start with something boring and you’re consistent, then you’re boring worldwide.”

Brands, he says, need to allow local agencies more room to produce work that is “more insightful” for the regional market. The brand owners have locked not just themselves, but their competitors, into one similar format,” says Richa. “It’s time to turn the tables around and look at it from a different perspective.”

A FRESH LOOK
Memac Ogilvy’s Barakat is responsible for the local version of Dove’s hugely successful “Campaign for Real Beauty” which uses “average” women as models. Some old, some large, some who are not conventionally pretty. Dove’s advertising strategy, he says, has shown that beauty brands can successfully sell a product without sticking to a formula.

“You had that cliché thing: Looking skinny and miserable is cool. Then along comes a brand that says, ‘You know what? Let’s celebrate.’ Beauty is what you think of it. Beauty is what you are happy with. You should feel beautiful because you are beautiful. You are beautiful in your own way,” he says.

“So while some women might look at you and say that you’re fat, some women might look at you and say you’re fabulous. You’re glowing, you’re not thin and skinny – looking depressed and miserable. Dove is not saying to women, ‘Don’t care about beauty. Don’t care about your figure.’ It’s not saying you should aspire to be overweight. No. It’s saying if you’re happy being thin, be thin. If you’re happy being a little bit overweight, stay a little bit overweight.”

At first, Barakat says, the agency was skeptical about the campaign’s chances of success in this region. “We wondered whether it would touch a nerve with Arab women, who for years have been, if you want, doctored and manipulated and brainwashed that she has to accept a certain parameter of beauty,” he says. But the campaign has proved to be a phenomenal success both critically and commercially.

“It shows you that if you come up with something different and you do it in a sincere way, and there’s some thought behind it, consumers will reward you,” Barakat says. “They’ll reward you by becoming emotionally linked to your brand or product, but they’ll also reward you commercially. They’ll buy your product. Which is a nice finding.”

Building an “emotional link” is where Impact BBDO’s Richa feels most beauty brands are failing in the Middle East. “If you talk to women, there’s a performance side – ‘What does this product do for me?’ – and there’s an emotional side – ‘How does it make me feel? What does it say about me?’” he says. “I think we can do more with the emotional part. There, your boundaries are much larger and you can do things that are more interesting, more intriguing and more engaging than yet another face. No matter how expensive the face may be.”

One way of establishing stronger links, Richa says, is to move outside of traditional above-the-line media, thus allowing for different executions of common themes. “Maybe there’s only so much one can say [about beauty products]. So maybe you can be creative about where you say it, rather than what you say. And that’s one reason to go for ambient media. Because you can talk to women when they’re in a different state of mind.”

The campaign for Lebanese cosmetic and fragrance retailer C&F, from Impact BBDO in Beirut, is a case in point. The campaign branded taxi cab windows with shots of a crowd of paparazzi. It plays on the same aspirational theme as ads using celebrities, but with a twist.

“The consumer becomes the celebrity,” says Richa. It’s not an original idea, he admits, but the execution makes it fresh. “There are a couple of ads running on TV right now with normal people walking the red carpet – they’re a bit bleurrrrghh.

“Sometimes the form or the medium is as important as the message itself. And this choice of media helps make the same message a bit more intelligent. A bit more engaging. They’re out of home, on the move and they want to look their best. And it says to the consumer that we know you understand what we’re trying to say without us spoon-feeding it to you, and we know that you’re amused by the smartness of doing things differently.”

FUN IN THE SUN
Saatchi’s Kanakry, too, advocates the use of different media to grab women’s attention. For Olay’s Natural White skin-lightening and sun-protection cream, Saatchi branded washroom mirrors in various UAE shopping malls.

“Since it’s a skin-lightening product, we placed it on a small acrylic frame, that’s a bit white-ish. So when women looked in the mirror, they’d look fairer in that Olay frame,” he says. “It created a lot of hype around the brand.”

With Olay, Kanakry is used to dealing with global guidelines. But, he says, the client is smart enough to give the agency room to manoeuvre.

“For print, one of the global guidelines [for Natural White] is that we have to have a close-up model shot. Perfect model shot, perfect skin,” he says. “But even with that, we try to make the best out of it. It doesn’t have to restrict the creative side of it. Most of the time, we’d use a model [anyway]. Because it’s aspiring and it’s inspiring. It’s not a bad thing to have.”

The important thing, he says, is to add a twist. “It’s not just a model shot and the headline. Otherwise it would be like all other brands. You can see in the ads that we add elements. Like in the Natural White print ads, the main idea for the campaign is ‘Don’t let the sun spoil your fun.’ So we have the weather chart at the bottom, with [the tagline] ‘Funday, Funday, Funday…’”

MUST TRY HARDER
The message of regional creatives: Women of the Middle East have their own personalities and aspirations which may differ greatly from those of Western women. The brands that best address them first should reap considerable rewards.

“It’s absolutely not true that every woman in the world wants to look like a Westerner,” says Brandcom’s Ammanath. “There’re a lot of regional nuances that aren’t reflected in the advertising. Which is very sad. I’m sure these brands are selling OK, but, from an advertising point of view, it could be a lot better.”

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