#104 Hairway Robbery

So I’m watching TV, broadcast not cable, and this commercial comes on. At first, I think the guy in it is George Lucas, or Tommy Hilfiger. He’s got one of those aging-designer sort of looks to him. Eyes pulled back a little more than you’d expect, skin stretched just a little too tight across his cheekbones, and of course the obligatory black beard shot with gray grown just long enough to disguise his receding chin line. Or is that his enlarging turkey neck? It turns out it’s Paul Mitchell. And at first I don’t pay attention to what he’s saying because I didn’t know there actually IS a Paul Mitchell. I thought he was one of those mythical characters, like Tommy Bahama or Uncle Ben.
Anyhow, when I finally focused on the commercial message, Paul was doing a mock interview type thing. He was telling someone off-camera that if they ever saw one of his products in a drug store it was counterfeit. That he had worked really hard on his special formulations and wanted the public to know that he would only sell them through licensed hair care professionals and the public shouldn’t be fooled by these counterfeit or highjacked and diverted products they find at certain big retailers that are known to hire greeters.
Wow, I thought, counterfeit haircare products. Starving people in Africa and homeless tsunami victims flashed through my ironic brain. Paying national TV advertising dollars to tell his clients that they’d better watch out for pseudo-gel seemed the height of false pride. Or something. Talk about a bad hair day. I mean, is the industry so not overwhelmed with every nuance of hair care product, from Fructis to Sassoon, from White Rain to Suave, that a counterfeiter would have a chance in hair hell of making a dime in the process? Real counterfeiters, who know the difficulty of putting even a fake product on the market, realize that if you’re going to counterfeit something, it probably shouldn’t be one dollar bills. If the market is saturated with a product, or the cost of producing the product exceeds the likely profit you’ll make, then... Well, let’s just say counterfeiting a Van Gogh is a better idea than putting out a fake happy face sticker.
So it was a little odd to see the real Paul Mitchell going on and on about someone trying to foist a fake Paul Mitchell on the market. Many would say the prices he charges for his products are highway robbery anyhow. And as for licensed haircare professionals being the only ones capable of dispensing his special formulations. I mean, really. It’s not like being a pharmacist, where one bad drug interaction could cause liver failure, death or even gastric bloating and diarrhea. This is hair goop for god’s sake. So you might actually get a little frizzy. Your coif may look like a fright wig, but that doesn’t mean you’ve been hurt enough to really be scared.
Still, it was a sort of inverse left-handed advertising approach that may actually be effective. This is Paul Mitchell and I just thought you’d like to know, my product’s so good, people want it bad enough to steal it.
America, ya gotta love it.