How to sell your product

to a gullible idiot like me

The other week I was laughing at Johnnie Boden trying to woo with me with a personalised catalogue with my name emblazoned on the front.

FIONA YOU MAKE CHRISTMAS HAPPEN it said.

No luck, Johnnie. That’s not the way to sell your stuff to me. Take a lesson from Bobbi Brown.

As I’m sure you know Bobbi Brown is a celebrated make-up artist who had a hugely successful product line, and then sold it, and now she has a newish brand called Jones Road.

I am slightly obsessed with Jones Road, not because I buy much make-up, or indeed anything beyond the absolute essentials for life. Jimmy reckons I’d exist quite happily with an ancient TV made of wood.

However Bobbi Brown/Jones Road has plagued me on every social media channel for over a year now. Every time I log on, there she is: effortlessly sexy and cool with her swishy dark hair and glasses, conveying the message: It’s you but better.

Now that’s something I want. Not to be totally overhauled or plumped with silicone or anything like that. But to be improved imperceptibly. Okay, not imperceptibly because what I really want is to basically be Julianne Moore. Older women love her because she is utterly foxy but doesn’t look ‘done’. To me, a Jones Road product seems like Essence de Julianne squished into a little pot.

I am a fool for this stuff. Yes, I will cook from a frying pan with a wobbly handle purchased in 1983. But Bobbi wants to sell me her Miracle Balm and I WANT IT!

Even though I don’t fully understand what it is.

I don’t know what it is. But I want it!

I’d say it’s a cream blusher but in the videos I’ve watched 27,000 times Bobbi is dabbing it onto women’s temples and lips and even their necks - like she can’t stop dabbing. As if everything now - faces, shoulders, the hubcaps on your car - are just better with a touch of balm.

Could it be dabbed on the little hole under our kitchen units to stop the mice coming in?

And lubricate my rusty bike chain?

I feel like Bobbi could tell me - as she is everywhere. When I nip into the loos at Glasgow Central Station I expect her to spring out from a cubicle and smear the stuff on me: ‘There! So much better!’ And this makes me think, why do I buy things? What makes a marketing campaign ‘speak’ to me?

Jimmy is right about the tightass ancient telly thing, or indeed anything regarding appliances, kitchenware or clothing basics. The tumble dryer with a broken door was only replaced when I was away on a work trip and I’ll wear socks until they are in tatters.

But useless stuff, sold with a ridiculous promise? I’m there!

This is what makes me buy things.

The promise of a lifestyle change. Self care hasn’t always been my top priority. As friends will attest, I’ve overindulged and poisoned myself and anything that promises to pressure-wash my gut, before it’s too late - I want this!

The promise of being a better parent. Eg, when one of my kids went vegan I tried to embrace the whole thing. However, when you first start cooking like this you think your vision has gone weird because everything is either beige or brown. Where is all the colour in life? you wonder as you stir a vat of something the colour of poo. Thrilled with a reason to buy unnecessary stuff, I acquired a shelfload of vegan cookbooks promising that meals would be zingy! And fresh! And dazzlingly colourful! And so they were - but said offspring wasn’t vegan anymore.

An upselling beauty counter person. In what other areas of life does an otherwise sensible woman buy items she doesn’t actually want, and will never use? Do you ever set out to buy, say, a potato masher and allow yourself to be foisted with an unnecessary fondue set, an olive wood carving board and a silver plated champagne bath? Of course you don’t. Yet I have gone to a beauty counter to buy a single mascara and left the store in financial ruins.

A charming beauty counter person. Then I might as well just give them all my money and sign over ownership of our flat.

Being ground down by prolonged low-level nagging. Bobbi would never term it nagging but that’s what it’s been. A persistent campaign to chip-chip-chip at my resolve to NOT buy the Miracle Balm because, although many women say it is indeed a ‘miracle’, many others reckon it’s like Vaseline with a bit of pigment in and it gums your hair to your cheek.

There’s only one way to find out.

I’d better be Julianne Moore by Sunday, is all I’m saying.

Love,

Fiona xx

PS Ever wanted to run away from Christmas - or at least those colossal to-do lists? If so, my newest novel ‘Tis the Damn Season is for you - and you can buy for a tiny 99p, here!