Cosmetic companies don’t want your soul, but they do want you to buy their products. To accomplish this goal, they spend a lot of money on a variety of activities designed to influence your purchasing decisions. To give you some idea of how much money, last year more than $900 million were spent on cosmetic advertising. Marketing professionals, advertising people, even motivational analysts have been employed-all to convince you and me that we can look younger, lovelier and more appealing … if we use the right products.
Some of them are very good at this convincing, so good that they have convinced themselves and their employees that this is the case. Nowhere is this more apparent than with many of the salespersons at the actual cosmetic counters. It’s here that you find a peculiar combination of hype and sincerity that is hard to beat. And it’s here that you can make major purchasing mistakes.
