Sunday Story: Does She or Doesn’t She?

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This is a story of the previous century’s most enduring, appealing and successful advertising slogans, "Does She or Doesn’t She?" See pictures of the ads  below.

It was the time in the 1950s and 1960s when hair coloring was a stigma and most women found it difficult to hide the few strands of off-colour hair. All this changed when the modern hair coloring revolution came not through a safer product, or through a one-step, easy-to-use formulation, but through clever, image-changing advertising that captured the feminist sensibilities of the day.

In 1949, the single-step Miss Clairol Hair Colour Bath was introduced to the American beauty industry. In 1956, Clairol launched an at-home version of Miss Clairol Hair Colour Bath and became a household name. Clairol’s one-step home colour was a breakthrough in the beauty industry as was its advertising campaign. Clairol hired the advertising firm Foote, Cone & Belding, which assigned the account to a junior copywriter, Shirley Polykoff, the only female copywriter at the firm.

When Polykoff met her future mother-in-law for the first time, she took her son aside and asked him about the true colour of his girlfriend’s hair. Does She colour her hair or Doesn't She? The embarrassed Polykoff could imagine what her mother-in-law was asking. Although, Polykoff did colour her hair, the practice was not something to which women openly admitted during that period. In 1956, when Polykoff was assigned the Clairol campaign hair dye was still considered to be something not used by genteel women. Polykoff remembered and recalled the question her mother-in-law asked, Does She or Doesn’t She? That moment the century’s most successful advertising slogans was born!

It became a very effective and memorable slogan. The first time Clairol asked this question in 1957, the answer was 15 to 1. That’s right, only one in fifteen women were using artificial hair colour. Just eleven years later, the answer was 2 to 1 according to a report published by Time magazine. In 1967, eleven years after the launch of the Clairol campaign, Polykoff was inducted into the Advertising Hall of Fame.

What is the secret of Clairol’s uncommon advertising success? Clairol did the opposite of what most marketers would do. They didn’t want every woman on the street running around saying that they were using their product. Instead they wanted women to understand that their product was so good, people wouldn’t be able to tell if they were using it or not. As if with a wink the subhead in these ads read: Only her hair dresser knows for sure!  Sometimes, simply conveying how and why your product works is not enough. Showing becomes more effective than telling. It was the first time in advertising, discretion, an understatement, worked better.






You may also want to read my piece on:  Weekday Musings: Courage To Choose The Path To Happiness

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