When a woman thinks about her body and beauty she is sensitive, and when a product is new or gifted to her, it is often embarrassing to say, I don’t really know how to use it. By not talking to her or enabling a conversation with her, you actually make her wonder whether you really care about her.

One of the products I received in a hamper from Helena Rubinstein at the Women’s Forum is the Face Sculptor. I’ve never used any face-lifting or toning product earlier, but I’m approaching my 41st birthday, and thought I should start now - and nothing better than when the product, in it’s beautiful packaging, is staring at me in the face screaming “use me”. So I opened the pack a couple of days ago, but while opening it, got distracted by a visitor. I picked it up again yesterday, and looked for the pamphlet to get instructions on how to use it, but realised I had discarded it. I wanted to read the instructions because the cream felt a little different in texture and I wondered whether there is any special application technique for it. So I thought no worries, I’ll check it up online. Sure enough I found the product on the website easily.

After nearly 10 minutes of searching through the website though, I was unable to find any instructions on application technique - all that I saw is this:

That’s no solution!

Then I did a search on ‘face sculptor toning application technique’, which is how the website described the application, and this is what Google returned:

Similar for searches associating the brand with terms like r-structuring lift cream, anti-wrinkle cream, firming cream, anti-ageing cream. Hmmmm. What I was expecting, from a premium and specialist product like this is that:

• there should be a link off the brand page as this is a common question users may have
• the FAQ’s should address this too, instead of mere ‘advertising’ spiel
• when I Google ‘Face Sculptor application technique, I’m taken directly to the FAQ page on the site
• there must be many women like me, and plenty of beauty and grooming sites and forums, which might have been able to help - but I couldn’t find any. Why aren’t these companies encouraging users to share these things?
• the Brand - Face Sculptor would be strongly associated with keywords like ‘toning’, but I didn’t see it anywhere on the first few pages I looked at
• this is stretching it .. but how wonderful to be able to find a video on YouTube demonstrating the application
• that the marketing team at Helena Rubinstein is aware that many folks are now turning to the internet to get their queries addressed, as these are behaviours we are learning from other product experiences. Just yesterday it was so easy for me to reset my Airport Express router by following instructions I found online. While Airport Express is not an everyday consumer product, the technical details that come with every technical consumer product you buy now are on the internet, and they are teaching us new behaviours.
• they are not tagging keywords associated with their product to enable quick sharing and discovery across different media online

And finally and most importantly, that they should be able to easily and effectively solve my problem, either directly or by linking to others who might!

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