When Jackie at Jack & Hill beauty blog talks about the difficulty of getting a decent looking fake tan, one that doesn’t make your skin the shade of burnt hot dog, she mentions Johnson & Johnson Holiday Skin as one that she finds more than acceptable:
But I’m hear to testify: It’s good stuff. It smells nice. It has yet to stain my hands (I use Bath & Body Works Cucumber Melon Hand Soap, which is pretty granular, post-application). It’s made skirt-wearing a (mostly) apprehension-free experience this summer. It hasn’t saved my life, but it’s saved me some grief, and for that I am grateful.
As this is such a rare occurrence for me to get there before Jackie, I’d like to point out that I have known about Johnson & Johnson Holiday Skin and used it throughout the summer. Despite being inexpensive (or maybe because of it) and its unglamorous packaging, it has become the cult product of this holiday season. So I googled Johnson & Johnson Holiday Skin in order to a) find a link to support this fact and b) to see whether J&J have picked up on its unheralded success, officially or unofficially.
The top search result is a shopping site ciao.co.uk where the product got some glowing reviews. Next two are online pharmacies, an Ozzie Pharmacy Online and an UK one, express chemist, both without reviews or comments from users. The third one is a site called Razordish. With 47reviews, surprisingly, not all of them positive. The fifth link, lo and behold, is Jackie’s beauty blog and her post that inspired this one. Only halfway through the second page, there is a link to Product Information page on jnj.com. No doubt useful and necessary, but I am a fashionista looking for information about a cult product. Oh wait, at the very bottom of the page here is a crumb they throw me:
Where can I find JOHNSON’S Holiday Skin Body Lotion?
Sales of JOHNSON’S Holiday Skin Body Lotion in the United Kingdom have surpassed our expectations, resulting in "out of stock" conditions at some retailers. Johnson & Johnson Limited (UK) is working hard to resupply the market and is sending the product to retailers as quickly as possible. Availability of this product is expected to improve significantly over the coming weeks. Thank you for your patience and your interest in JOHNSON’S Holiday Skin Body Lotion.
A few points about this.
- You can’t right-click on jnj.com site, so can’t copy and paste for quotes. I had to retype the whole text! If I were not so far into the blog post, I wouldn’t have bothered. This is the age of the ’social web’, and to do this to your readers (and potential distributors of your content) is profoundly ‘anti-social’ web.
- Also, it means that all the trademarks and brand symbols in the original text are not going to get conveyed as I am using it for my story, not theirs.
- There is no date or context for the statement and so not much use to me as information about when I can get hold of the product. It might just as well not be there, to be honest.
Remember my original intention behind searching for Johnson & Johnson’s Holiday Skin? The result was failure to find any meaningful information on either front – from the fashion magazines who presumably elevated the product to its cult status or from the company that makes it. Why not?
Roland Turner
on Sep 25th, 2006
@ 8:07 am:
Sounds like you’re using Internet Explorer, which is a bit limiting, but presumably even Microsoft hasn’t dumped the Cut/Copy/Paste shortcuts (Ctrl+X, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V) in IE?
Adriana
on Sep 25th, 2006
@ 10:18 am:
Roland, I am almost hurt that you’d think I don’t know about Cut/Copy/Paste shortcuts (Ctrl+X, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V)!
I actually prefer them to right click… But alas, on jnj.com they just don’t work. Period. You get a dialog window saying “right click functionality has been disabled on this website”. So my point stands.
Roland Turner
on Sep 25th, 2006
@ 19:18 pm:
No insult was intended
As a user of a minority platform I’m accustomed to working around webmaster foolishness but, you’re correct of course, this is indeed an own-goal by J&J.
Jackie Danicki
on Sep 25th, 2006
@ 20:54 pm:
Adriana, I first heard about Holiday Skin from you! As I know you’re a discerning customer, your evangelism led to my purchase(s – I’ve bought a few bottles for friends, too). You’re the sort of customer every brand manager dreams of.
The topic of corporate websites which totally disregard the aims of the customer (aka ‘user’ – I’m a beauty addict, not a smack addict, thankyouverymuch) is one dear to our hearts at Jack & Hill. The people green-lighting these sites (I’m convinced much of the stupidity is down to agencies showing clients very slick sites where they control all look and functionality, and the client thinking that’s great, and totally ignoring the customer) seemingly have no idea how evangelism-proof they are making their brands. As I blogged on one occasion, “Make it as easy as possible for women like us to spend money on your products, to spread the word about them, and to help build your brand without you having to spend a penny. Now, it’s easier than ever. Ignorance is no excuse; it’s shameful.”
We have blogged many pleas to companies, begging them to show one ounce of sensibility when using the web to communicate with customers. Time and again, they screw themselves quite unnecessarily with customer-hostile technology (like disabling right-click functionality, or holding pertinent information hostage in PDFs). If you’re interested, here is just a tiny sample of brands we’ve blogged about whose websites show that they need some serious schooling in the most basic of skills: having empathy and consideration for those who pay their wages.
Proctor & Gamble (and ThisWorks)
L’Oreal
Lacoste
Lancome
If you dig deeper into our archives, you can also find us railing against the evangelism-proof sites of Frederick Fekkai, Pierre Michel, A+ Skin Care, and many others. Sooner or later, these brands are going to get hit – hard – with a clue-by-four about what the internet is actually about.
Again, thanks for leading me to Holiday Skin! My friends and mother-in-law thank you too.
Zimon
on Sep 25th, 2006
@ 21:04 pm:
Hmm.. Shortcut keys work fine for me (As does the Edit menu in IE).
Disabling active scripting in IE security settings will stop the Java Script on the page interupting the right click menu.
You can also use View -> Source in IE and grab the text from the HTML.
Flash websites and lifting text from inside images can be tricky, but it’s allways doable.
Adriana
on Sep 25th, 2006
@ 21:21 pm:
Zimon, thanks for that, the web always has its ways..
But how is your ‘average users’ to know?
Zimon
on Sep 25th, 2006
@ 22:26 pm:
Fair point. Perhaps when people realise a web page is not like TV, where you get exactly what was broadcast. The client side (browser) has an awfully lot of say in how the page will look and behave.
You can force colours, fonts, layouts all easily within IE, if you’re willing to mess with FireFox extensions you can do far more.
At some point I expect someone to say we need a way to slave the browser to the server. Encrypting the source on the host so only the browser (and not user) can read it – and forcing the browser to render the page as directed by server (Out goes add blocking software!).
Always worth having a quick look at the source of any noteworthy page – so much information gets left in that does not get displayed.
But, Fake Tan – Don’t see the point! Who wants to look like they’ve been got by the Daystar?
Michael Jennings
on Sep 26th, 2006
@ 13:52 pm:
I now do a lot of browsing on mobile devices (Blackberries, PDAs, other Smart Phones). These have small screens, and sometimes (but not always) are used over low bandwidth and/or expensive connections. It is interesting to see how different sites appear when I try to read them. They seem to fall into a few categories:
(a) Intelligent – the web server at the other end notices you are using a mobile device, and gives you a special low bandwidth, low screen resolution version of the site.
(b) Flexible – the website is designed to scale well to most conceivable screen sizes, and is designed for relatively low bandwidth requirements in the first place.
(c) At least you can see it – The website is not optimised or designed for mobile devices, but it sends the same information it would to an ordinary computer and you can view it.
(d) Really really dumb – The web server looks at your details and sends you an error message telling you that your screen is too small and/or you are using a browser it doesn’t recognise. (The more hilarious examples of this then redirect you to the Internet Explorer page at Microsoft so you can “upgrade” to a compatible browser).
Of these, (a) and (b) are both fine. (c) demonstrates designers who have probably not thought anything through, as there are proxy sites that can convert a (c) site to something resembling a (b) before anything is actually transmitted over the airwaves. (The Opera mobile and Opera mini browsers use one automatically – they are very clever). People responsible for (d) need to be taken out and shot though. It is again this idea that if you are not using the hardware they are thinking of or the internet in exactly the way they think you should, then the fault is yours. This really improves my respect for a company, obviously.
There seems little connection between the size or type of company and which category they fall into. (The BBC is an (a) and Time magazine is a (d), for instance. While I utterly detest the BBC, this means that it is my main news source when I travel.
Mchael Jennings
on Sep 26th, 2006
@ 13:54 pm:
And I can’t imagine why anyone would want a (fake or genuine) tan, but that may just be that I am an Australian.
Agnezka
on Sep 27th, 2006
@ 20:47 pm:
“Who wants to look like they’ve been got by the Daystar?”
Just the zillions of folks who like this cool product and who do not like looking like a pasty slug
mish
on Sep 27th, 2007
@ 6:51 am:
Like the j holiday skin tan product very much but it takes a while to build the tan.
As for M Jennings im also in Au and most of the population is wearing fake tans here!
Boshena the Spray Tan Expert
on Feb 18th, 2008
@ 9:10 am:
Jacke Denicki, you are so right about companies spending megadollars on offline advertising, but failing miserably when it comes to supporting their customers online. But they are watching. Not long ago I got threatened with legal action because I wrote some unfavourable stuff about company on my website.
And instead hunting down people that tell them the truth they should concentrate on making a better product (in my opinion anyway). I guess that they prefer not to know what are the issues for their customers in using their product. That doesn’t seem to be a very smart move, but sadly its true.