The Company I Keep: My Life in Beauty

When I got back to New York, I would write a personal letter to each person on the van trip—not a canned letter but a personal one that mentioned some of the things we saw and talked about. To understand my motivations, let me say that I firmly believe that people don’t work only for money. They work for recognition. I often say to friends who may

The launch of Clinique was a classic case of leveraging market segmentation. Looking back, this was probably the most important lesson I learned in my entire career: if you understood market segmentation, you understood everything. If you believe in market segmentation, you know that one marketing campaign cannot cover the globe. There have to be m

Up until then, every cosmetic ad was designed to sell a product. I decided that rather than selling only a product, our ads would sell the brand. The brand would be timeless and would translate across languages and countries. All our advertising would be oriented toward the brand. Focusing on the brand would hone our identity and be our North Star:

It led to my long-term decision of always keeping some distance between myself and the people who work for me. That didn’t mean “no socializing,” because socializing is both pleasant and necessary to build team morale and cohesiveness. But I was always very careful about drinking, and I didn’t play golf or tennis with them. I didn’t want them to se

Creating our own competition both brings about something and prevents something.

They eventually began offering free gifts themselves. But, my mother pointed out, “What they were giving away were their mistakes—the colors that didn’t sell, the ineffective creams that died on the counter, last year’s failures. They tried to unload their lemons on customers. Bad business, I say. How can you expect a customer to return for more if

Back in my college days, I launched competing film clubs to reach a wider audience. I created Clinique specifically to compete with Estée Lauder. Competing against myself is an idea that never grows old. Who was going to compete with M·A·C? The answer, unquestionably, was Bobbi Brown Cosmetics.

A multi-brand model for Estée Lauder had always been in my mind. I thought, “I know just what I’d do if I were competing with Estée Lauder. Why let a competitor do it? I’ll do it!”

If there wasn’t a new product being launched, we would often create extensions of existing products to launch, such as new shades of existing lipsticks or a lighter version of one of our fragrances. I call this “scalloping,” a technique I borrowed from the mass marketers when they continually reinvented their laundry detergents by adding a new twis