Estée Lauder and Grassroots Marketing in the Days Before Social Media
“I never dreamed about success. I worked for it.”
— Estée Lauder
In some ways, Estée Lauder was made of myth. She spun countless stories about her own life, telling people she was descended from European aristocracy and grew up wealthy in an enclave of Long Island. In truth, she was born to Hungarian Jewish immigrants and grew up poor in Queens, working from a young age to help her family make ends meet.
Lauder was a self-made entrepreneur with a knack for appealing to women’s vanity. She got her start in her uncle’s chemist business, helping hawk cosmetic products that she later reinvented. One of Lauder’s earlier innovations was a nifty little beauty product called Youth-Dew that you can still buy today (on Amazon, natch). Envisioned as an everyday replacement for the expensive perfumes of the time, Youth-Dew was a scented bath oil women could use in lieu of perfume — an expensive commodity typically gifted by husbands, in those days.
“Decades before social media became mainstream, Estée ran word-of-mouth campaigns. Her oft-repeated mantra was ‘Telephone, Telegraph, Tell a Woman.’ She believed that women who liked her products would spread the word.”
Lauder was the consummate entrepreneur, possessing not just a vision which would prove to innovate the beauty industry, but a hands-on approach and endless tenacity. She’s known for attending the opening of nearly every new Estée Lauder store, personally training the sales staff and overseeing merchandising. She also believed wholeheartedly that if you make a good product, your customers will sell it for you. Yet, she famously said, “I have never worked a day in my life without selling. If I believe in something, I sell it, and I sell it hard.”
Had Lauder come of age in these days of Instagram influencers, she no doubt would have rivaled the best of them. But in her own time, in her own way, she figured out how to speak to consumers directly, addressing problems they didn’t even know they had, and magically providing the solutions.
