In China, Revlon is sold in department stores with the help of beauty advisors, who are educated on the brand. In October 2012, Julia Goldin, Revlon’s Executive Vice President, Global Marketing Officer, said a key challenge to selling in China was “the fact that you’re selling in a department store, and that means you have to have beauty advisors who are skilled, you have to build loyalty with the beauty advisors as they really are the ones presenting the brand. So in some ways, whereas in the United States we can control what our merchandising looks like perfectly, the consumer walks to the shelf and she self-selects—there we’re relying on how the beauty advisor will sell.” However, Julia added that the challenge also presented an opportunity in that “[we] can give consumers such a big representation of [the] brand by turning beauty advisors into real advocates.”
Revlon made a big push in China in 2012 and named that year’s fall makeup collection Shanghai Collection by Gucci Westman, Revlon’s Global Artistic Director. That summer Julia and Gucci visited Beijing to reignite the positioning of the brand to today’s Chinese woman.
“In China, women are evolving in terms of their roles,” Julia said in the fall of 2012. “They’ve always played a very strong role in society because they’ve had equal opportunities as men in a socialist society. However, there’s always been tension between the expected traditional role of women and who women are today…The expected look is a pretty face but very understated, almost conservative. Chinese women are in fact the most confident consumers in the world and there are a lot of women there who really want to shake it up. We had a big question: Revlon is a brand of makeup, a brand of color. Is that relevant to Chinese women?”
