Never mind the boswellox

By Paul Flower on Feb 4, 09 03:11 PM

It probably began with 8 out of 10 cats. You remember the ones, those who expressed a preference for one form of canned mechanically recovered meat (plus water, ash*, copper sulphate) over another. They may have been the first to use statistical justification for advertising claims.

Since then it has clearly become law. One of my chief pleasures (OK, I should get out more) is trying to catch the amusing print in TV ads; it's a small point of amusement to discover that when 100% of women recommended a particular skin cream the study actually only involved 60 people. As the maxim goes, there are lies, damned lies and statistics - but 100% in bold type with a persuasive voiceover sounds a great deal more impressive than sixty random** women.

The other one to catch my eye was for Flora Buttery which was announced to 'taste better' than its rivals. The small print revealed that the study results were 48% vs. 45% with the remainder expressing no preference. Even worse the size of the sample (200) meant that the grand claim was based on just six people saying that they liked it better than Lurpak Lighter Spreadable. 14 people either couldn't tell any difference or couldn't care less, but that doesn't sell quasi-butter of course.

Of course it's all about price this year, which is fairly dull and negates the beauty of advertising which, in its purest form, is really about creating desire; the feeling that you need something, that your life won't be complete without it. When it comes down to price there's really no art-form involved, it's just about all the supermarkets hiring their own price comparison surveys and claiming to be cheaper on a range of products, yawn.

Now that genuine humour seems to have disappeared from our advertising the things that make the ad breaks interesting in 2009 are either great effects and technique or the cosmetic companies. Not content with manipulating the statistics, the purveyors of over-priced facial slop also like to create their own language. I have deigned to call it the compendium of cosmetic codswallop, you may know it better as boswellox.

When the words don't fit, let's make some up. Everyone has their favourites, I like the shampoo ingredient Ceramide R, for reasons linked to that recent Oxford University study that proves we recognise words by their start and end letters. Consequently no-one sees a word like Ceramide R, we all read it as creamier - which was surely the intent.

Using this theory you'd imagine boswellox was chosen to mimic botox, in which case mark that up as a massive FAIL for the dual reason that it is too long and it actually makes people think of a pair of swinging testicles. Not sure if you've seen any testicles recently but they tend not to be smooth & unwrinkled, that's if mine are anything to go by anyway. I would include a photo but I fear you may be too squeamish, or possibly I am.

PF Balls.JPG

Occasionally the ads use real terminology that you've never heard before - like collagen, which was initially a Greek word meaning 'glue producer' but is now the real word for bundles of proteins within our body which assist functions such as bones, ligaments and blood - not just skin. In the world of cosmetic companies they choose to enhance the word by saying their product contains 'collagen re-plumper' and that 73% of the women who tested the product agreed with their enhancing claims. This was, of course, 73% of 217 women, or 158.41 to you and me.

When cosmetic companies are trying not to blind you with science (lawyers note - this is not to infer that any of their products are likely to blind humans, that's why they test them on bunnies) they're overwhelming you with a patronising celeb - or, even worse, a magazine editor. "yah, all the medical research tells me to look out for pentapeptides, that's why I'm a stuck-up old bint who is totally owned by my advertisers." I made the last bit up, obviously.

The research seems to suggest that women possibly care more about packaging, brand-names, perceived high-production values, and endorsement from women they admire than actual science (note I'm not a woman, I may be wrong) so why do they bother with these ridiculous scientific-sounding names?

The reason is purely product-differentiation. There probably is not much in reality to differentiate one face cream for another - and who reads the packaging anyway? Invent a few words for your mix of generic ingredients and then you can trade-mark it and use it in your advertising. Job done - and we can all laugh at re-plumping, boswellox, pro-retinol a, etc. Because we're worth it.

* Check the ingredients for yourself.
** I appreciate that they are probably not random but some statistically correct cross-referenced sample of society. Similarly random in this instance does not mean that they chose the preferable sample of a larger study.
*** The photo is me & the balls I'm willing to show you on a blog.

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