George Blogs!

As those of you who know me in offline life (interesting term, isn’t it?) are aware, I am now in the process of wrapping up my marketing examination. As part of it, we are expected to produce our analysis of the growth and decline of The Body Shop (TBS) brand, and of its subsequent acquisition by L’Oreal. For this reason, I thought I’d blog about it, since, to me, it is a classic case of an organization investing a lot into branding and then, for one reason or another, literally losing the way.

For the most part, the story of TBS is the story of societal marketing gone wrong. Anita Roddick sought to differentiate the brand from the competition by emphasizing an extensive list of core values that separated it from the competition (for instance, TBS did not use animal testing, respected the environment and invested heavily into marginalized communities worldwide).

The problems really started when other beauty-care brands began entering the market and positioning themselves in about the same manner as TBS - in other words, socially responsible and environmentall friendly. Faced with this situation, TBS found itself unable to compete, now that its first-mover advantage has been wasted.

Already in its death throes, TBS attempted to reposition its brand to the so-called “masstige” market - in other words, to combine glamour and excusivity with mass appeal. But, as I’ve already discussed at length elsewhere on my blog, mainstream marketing, as a concept, is quite dead. Similarly, mainstream marketing for a previous niche product is just asking for trouble. In the end, TBS lost its original customers, but never really acquired new ones.

What lessons can we learn from the TBS disaster? First and foremost, first-mover advantage is a headstart, and not a competitive advantage in and of itself. Just because you’ve beaten everyone else to the market doesn’t mean that it’s going to stay that way. In fact, the more successful you are, the more attractive your market will be for your prospective competitors, and the sooner they will enter in. And if you can’t differentiate yourself from them when that happens, then your business life will be very short-lived, indeed.

Secondly, mainstream and prestige don’t mix. You can either have a mainstream brand or a prestige brand - but you really can’t have it both ways. Prestige implies exclusivity, which violently contradicts the notion of mass consumption. For good examples of what happens when you take a prestige brand to the masses, consider the marketing debacles of Lacoste and Louis Vuitton.