Estee Lauder’s Marketing Maven
Jeanette Sarkisian Wagner’s favorite quote these days is from business guru Peter Drucker: “Old age is in its infancy.” The 70-year-old vice chairman of Estee Lauder Cos. should know. At an age when most executives think about retirement, Wagner has taken on the business development of two new Lauder companies, Aveda and jane.
Ageism is clearly just one more frontier for her to defy and conquer. This is a woman who made a big career change at age 45, when she left journalism for the cosmetic business in 1975.
Wagner and her team introduced both free-standing stores and U.S.-style product sampling overseas for the Estee Lauder, Clinique and Aramis brands. She opened Estee Lauder and Clinique boutiques in then-Communist Eastern Europe and the former USSR in the late 1980s. The Clinique store in Warsaw has become the brand’s most successful free-standing store, with monthly retail sales of $30,000. From there, she moved on to introduce Clinique in China.
Her team is also credited with introducing other Estee Lauder lines, Origins, Bobbi Brown essentials, M*A*C and Tommy Hilfiger, in Europe, Asia and Latin America.
Her success at taking Lauder into new markets is well known in fashion and beauty circles. Wagner drew a standing-room-only crowd recently when she came to town to talk about brand management to the local branch of Fashion Group International and the Harvard Business School Alumna (where she got an MBA).
Besides explaining how the Lauder brands are marketed, Wagner talked about her favorite concept for success, this one from Charles Darwin. Survival, she said, is not about being the strongest or smartest. “It’s about the species that is most adaptable to change.”
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Adaptability is what gives her the edge, she said. Instead of being shocked by other countries’ business ethics--because standards and practices are different--she learned to work around them, once persuading Soviet politicos it made business sense for them not to take home armloads of Estee Lauder merchandise when visiting the store.
Wagner is now expanding into drugstore chains, because Lauder is aiming for the teen market with jane, its first mass-market brand. The jane brand is already sold at Wal-Mart, CVS and Target, well outside of Lauder’s carefully cultivated prestige market.
Cosmetic companies, like others in retail, face significant challenges, she said. Such issues include new Internet competitors, the shrinking number of department stores, the blurred line between “class and mass” and changing perceptions of what is exclusive.
Even with these changes, Wagner said the keys to cosmetic brand marketing remain product quality, maintaining the line’s image and offering service--even for jane at the mass discounters.
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In Wagner’s view, there is a lack of qualified people both at the counter and in the retail world’s executive suites. Lauder spends more money than any other cosmetic company in training sales staff, she said.
“If you want customers for life, you cannot fail them,” said Wagner, who insisted that products be available to every woman who stood in line on opening day at the first Estee Lauder store in Moscow.
Much of the company’s commitment to service derives from founder Estee Lauder and her son, Leonard, who believed that beauty was about touch and experience, Wagner said. That philosophy continues with the third generation, grandchildren Jane, Aerin and William Lauder.
A day after her speech, a relaxed Wagner talked over lunch at the Four Seasons Hotel about her earliest lessons from two brilliant marketers--her parents, Armenian immigrants who had two grocery stores in Chicago during the Depression.
Her father, like the Lauder brands, offered “gifts with purchase.” If you spent $5 on groceries, you got free delivery. And young Jeannette was the delivery system. “He told me, ‘Never take a tip. This is part of the service.’ ”
They also told her there were no limits, even though she was a girl and a first-generation American. So with their approval, she went on to be the women’s editor at the Chicago Daily News; the first female senior editor at the Saturday Evening Post; and, later, editor in chief of the Hearst Corp.’s international magazines. She has great stories about being a rare female editor in the very male world of magazines--the Post editors dismissed her suggestions that they write a story about this band from England that was going to be really big--the Beatles.
Wagner was a seasoned journalist when she joined Lauder in 1975 as vice president and director of marketing of the International Division.
Today, she also sits on 11 boards, including the White House Advisory Committee on Trade Policy and Negotiations and the New York Stock Exchange. She was honored in 1996 by the Cosmetic Executive Women. She’s been married for 34 years to Paul Wagner, a retired public relations director and professor, and has two grown stepchildren. Her 82-year-old husband travels with her and joined her at lunch, smiling and laughing at stories he undoubtedly had heard before. She teased him, “I used to go to London, Paris and Rome. I now go to Arkansas and Providence, R.I.”
Wagner is enthusiastic about both jane and Aveda, “a hair-care company with a mission.” She exuberantly describes new techniques in harvesting flower blossoms without killing the plant. She burns candles in her Manhattan office.
But she is still the marketing whiz. Candles, aromatherapy and other cosmetic “mood enhancers” are big business for good reason, she said. “People are looking for something in this time of affluence that brings some kind of comfort.”
And with that, Wagner arranged her pashmina wrap in just the proper way and rose from the table. She had, after all, some Aveda salons to visit that afternoon. This was a business trip.
Barbara Thomas can be reached by e-mail at barbara.thomas@latimes.com.
