CoverGirl Quit Chasing Gen Z. More Brands Should Have the Guts to Do It
Trying to be loved by everyone is how brands become invisible. CoverGirl spent years chasing Gen Z; now it is betting on the women who actually remember buying it.
Trying to be loved by everyone is how brands become invisible.
CoverGirl spent years chasing Gen Z. Now it is betting on the women who actually remember buying it. Frankly, good. The expensive part is that it took a major beauty brand this long to admit the obvious: a brand without a clear customer is just a logo renting shelf space.
The core story: CoverGirl has picked a side
This is not a subtle adjustment in a media plan. CoverGirl’s owner, Coty, is repositioning the mass-market makeup brand around Gen X women — broadly, women now in their 40s, 50s and early 60s — rather than trying to turn it into a Gen Z darling.
Coty executive chairman and interim chief executive Markus Strobel has been blunt about the reason. Retailers, he said in the company’s May earnings discussion, kept telling him that Gen X women have money ready to spend and that hardly anyone is speaking to them. Coty is now working to make CoverGirl its defining Gen X brand. Bloomberg reported this week that the company is prioritising the women who grew up with the brand instead of trying to be all things to younger consumers.
That deserves more attention than the usual marketing-industry chin scratching, because it is a useful confession. Coty’s own leadership has acknowledged that CoverGirl bounced around: positioned for older consumers, then pushed toward Gen Z, then pulled back again. That is not brand strategy. That is a management team mistaking a demographic trend for a reason to exist.
The financial backdrop makes the pivot less romantic and more urgent. In its third-quarter fiscal 2026 release on May 5, Coty said CoverGirl and Sally Hansen were narrowing their retail-sales gap to their category and outperforming the category on unit sales. Encouraging, sure. But the same quarter included a $362.8 million asset-impairment charge, including $50.6 million related to the CoverGirl trademark. You do not write down a trademark like that because everything is humming along nicely.
Here is the bit most operators should take seriously: the answer was not necessarily a prettier TikTok, a louder influencer deal or a new font. It was deciding who the brand is for.
Chasing youth is usually lazy strategy dressed as ambition
Every boardroom has had this conversation.
“We need younger customers.”
Maybe. But that sentence normally arrives before anyone has done the harder work: defining the customer you can serve better than anybody else, the problem you own in her mind, the product proof behind the promise, and the channels where she will actually believe you.
Instead, brands see a young, highly visible cohort setting culture online and panic. They hire creators whose audiences do not buy the product. They slap trend language on packaging. They make ads that look like every other ad in a vertical-video feed. Then they call it relevance while their original customers wonder whether the business is embarrassed by them.
That is how you burn two assets at once: you fail to win the new buyer and you make the existing buyer feel discarded.
Gen Z is a perfectly legitimate market. It is also an atrocious target definition on its own. A 22-year-old makeup obsessive in Los Angeles, a 27-year-old nurse in Brisbane, and a 19-year-old student rationing rent money do not become one usable customer simply because they were born within a similar range of years. They have different budgets, habits, status signals and reasons for buying.
Coty learned that the hard way. Strobel said the attempt to make CoverGirl a full Gen Z brand “obviously did not work.” I respect the honesty. More executives should use those words before they spend another $20 million turning a decent brand into beige soup.
The background: legacy is only valuable if you use it
CoverGirl has an advantage newer brands would kill for: stored memory.
People know the name. They know the famous line. They can picture it in the chemist or supermarket aisle. That familiarity does not guarantee a sale — nostalgia without product quality is just a funeral slideshow — but it gives the business a credible starting point.
The trick is not to replay the old ads and call it heritage. The trick is to translate what the brand was trusted for into a sharper present-tense promise.
For CoverGirl, that could mean makeup that works for changing skin, practical product education, shade ranges that make sense, packaging that does not require a teenager’s eyesight, and imagery that treats mature women as customers rather than mothers in the background of somebody else’s campaign. The company’s public statements so far establish the target; execution will decide whether this becomes a turnaround or merely another PowerPoint.
Coty has also been trying to bring more discipline to its consumer-beauty operation. In February, the company said it was focusing investment on core CoverGirl and Rimmel franchises, while noting early improvement in sell-out. In May, it said its broader framework involved reallocating investment behind fourth-quarter activations. Translation: less scattergun activity, more bets that have to earn their keep.
That is not sexy. It is how real businesses recover.
The second-order implication: the attention economy has made focus more valuable
AI has made content cheaper. That does not make brand building cheaper.
Anyone can now produce 50 versions of an ad, generate polished product images and flood a feed with passable copy. Hightouch, for example, told TechCrunch in April that its AI marketing tools had helped it reach $100 million in annual recurring revenue, with brands using the product to create customised campaign assets without routing everything through traditional design and agency teams.
Fine. Useful technology. But cheaper execution creates a savage new problem: consumers see more competent-looking rubbish.
When every brand can manufacture assets at speed, the differentiator is not the asset. It is the decision underneath it. Who is this for? What do we want them to feel? What will we never do because it conflicts with our point of view? Why should they believe us?
A brand that says “we are for everyone” gives an AI tool nothing distinctive to amplify. It gets a mountain of generic output, then wonders why conversion stalls.
A brand that has a real customer and a real proposition can use AI to test messages, tailor education, improve service and remove waste. The machine becomes an amplifier, not the strategy. That distinction will separate winners from businesses spending a fortune to automate mediocrity.
The contrarian angle: do not confuse age targeting with ageism
There is a trap here. The lesson is not that every ageing brand should run to Gen X, slap “ageless” on a campaign and collect a cheque.
That would be the same mistake in reverse.
Gen X is not a cheat code. It is a large, varied group of people who can smell patronising marketing from across the car park. They do not need to be flattered into submission, and they certainly do not need another beauty ad pretending that ageing is a moral failure to be corrected with concealer.
The opportunity is better than that: serve a commercially meaningful group that has been underserved because marketers are addicted to novelty. But you must earn the right with product, representation and a message that respects the customer’s intelligence.
There is another overlooked point. A clearer Gen X position does not require CoverGirl to ban younger buyers at the door. Great brands attract adjacent customers all the time. The difference is that they do it as a consequence of clarity, not as a desperate audition for everybody’s approval.
The young customer may still buy CoverGirl if the product is excellent, the price is fair and the brand feels confident. Nobody is allergic to a brand because it knows itself. They are allergic to brands trying too hard to impersonate them.
What this means for you
If you run a business, take an hour this week and answer four questions without corporate sludge.
1. Who is your highest-value real customer? Not the customer you wish would buy. Pull the data: repeat buyers, gross margin, referral rate, time to purchase and refund behaviour. Find the people who create profit, not vanity metrics.
2. What do they hire you to do? Do not say “quality” or “community.” Everyone says that. State the job in plain English. If you cannot write it in one sentence, your ads will not save you.
3. What are you willing to give up? Positioning means exclusion. Decide which customers, claims, channels and trends you will stop chasing. This is where most teams lose their nerve.
4. Does the product prove the message? Before commissioning the campaign, inspect the offer. If your audience says the shade range, onboarding, pricing, service or packaging is wrong, fix that first. Marketing cannot permanently outmuscle a mismatch between promise and experience.
Then build one campaign around that customer, not 14 customer personas dreamed up in a workshop. Make it specific enough that some people will say, “That is not for me.” Good. It probably means somebody else will finally say, “That is exactly for me.”
CoverGirl’s shift is not revolutionary. It is more useful than revolutionary. It is a legacy brand being forced to relearn the oldest rule in business: if you try to be relevant to everyone, you become memorable to no one.
Pick your customer. Build for them properly. And stop confusing frantic activity with a strategy.