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A decade ago, a rising star named Zendaya was tapped to be the new face of Covergirl at 19 years old. A few years before, the brand had enlisted a promising 20-year-old songwriter, Taylor Swift, as a global ambassador. Since Covergirl’s launch in 1961, the cosmetics brand has consistently relied on up-and-coming celebrities and youthful models to sell makeup to its target demographic, young shoppers.
No longer. After years of chasing teens and twentysomethings, Covergirl — long known for its “easy, breezy, beautiful” tagline — is largely abandoning its pursuit of those fresh-faced customers and instead laying out a strategy to prioritise the women who grew up with the brand and are now in their 40s, 50s and early 60s: Generation X.
“Covergirl made the mistake of seeing the success of the indie brands and the interest of the younger Gen Z consumer and saying, ‘We need to do that too,’” says Gordon von Bretten, president of the consumer beauty division at Coty Inc., Covergirl’s owner. Since Paris- and New York-listed Coty acquired Covergirl, along with more than 40 other consumer beauty labels, from Procter & Gamble Co. in 2016 as part of a $12.5 billion deal, the brand “has lost market share and relevance, and top-of-mind awareness has gone down,” von Bretten says. “But I think with the significant reset we’re working on right now, this is the way to bring it back to what it should be.”
Sometimes called the “forgotten generation,” Gen X comprises consumers born from about 1965 to 1980. The cohort has historically received far less attention from marketers than the larger generations that came before (baby boomers) and after (millennials). Yet members of Gen X, many of whom say they feel invisible to the beauty industry, account for roughly one-third of total spending within the segment, and they’ll remain the world’s highest-spending generation across all consumer categories through at least 2033 as its members move through their peak earning years, according to NIQ data. “That’s quite a long period of time,” von Bretten says. The company didn’t say what share of its customers are already in the Gen X cohort, but it called the generation a “significant and growing portion of Covergirl’s consumer base.”
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Coty says the decision to chase an older customer comes as CoverGirl has lost some of its cachet with younger buyers, many of whom love makeup but aren’t necessarily loyal to one brand. Gen Z and even Gen Alpha shoppers constantly switch between beauty products discovered on social media and e-commerce platforms like TikTok Shop. Besides, with print magazines in decline, do most teenage customers even know what a “cover girl” is anymore?
Covergirl’s upcoming advertising campaign, which will begin midsummer across TV and social media, will feature models from age 45 to 55 instead of the twentysomething celebrities who have mostly represented the brand in recent years. Coty expects this course correction will help it restore Covergirl’s place in the roughly $700 billion beauty market and win back the middle-class, middle-aged, middle-American women it probably should never have lost sight of.
In addition to targeting older shoppers, Covergirl will also try to solidify its mass-market appeal by leaning further into affordability. The brand, already one of Coty’s lower-price offerings, plans to keep the launches of all new products below what it calls the “magical” $10 price point — ideally $9.95 — after recent products priced from $12 to $15 failed to meet sales expectations. That kind of affordability is especially appealing to Gen X, whose members are in many cases balancing the costs of raising children and caring for aging parents while saving for retirement. The price cuts are possible because Covergirl is getting leaner and faster in part by shifting more manufacturing and product development to third-party partners, von Bretten says.
Playing Favourites
The strategy is not without risks. What happens when members of Gen X age out of their heaviest caregiving years and perhaps find themselves with more disposable income? Will they stay loyal to Covergirl or trade up to more prestige brands? The new strategy is “more short-term-oriented than long-term-oriented,” unless Covergirl can also keep a pipeline of future consumers engaged, says Anna Lizzul, an analyst at Bank of America Corp. (To be sure, von Bretten added in a follow-up email, Covergirl will “continue to be a brand for all demographics and generations, while recognizing that its ‘sweet spot’ is Gen X.”)
Coty could use a win. The deal that brought it Covergirl was expected to roughly double the company’s annual revenue to more than $10 billion. Instead, the acquisition left Coty burdened with debt; losses neared $400 million on annual revenue of $5.9 billion in its latest fiscal year. The company’s market value has plunged by more than 70 percent over the past five years, to roughly $2 billion.
In December, Coty announced a sweeping leadership overhaul. About three months earlier, the company had hired von Bretten, a restructuring specialist who’d served as Coty’s chief transformation officer from 2020 to 2024, to lead its Consumer Beauty division, which also includes Max Factor, Rimmel London and Sally Hansen. Last fall, the company launched a strategic review of the portfolio; nothing has been sold so far. Despite the ongoing review, von Bretten says his mandate “really was not to come in here to run a sales process at all,” though he adds that “if there is external interest, that’s a compliment, of course.”
For now, though, he’s primarily focused on righting the ship at Covergirl. We’re going to be “intentional about serving that consumer,” he says, “rather than trying to be everything to everyone.”
By Sabela Ojea
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