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To read my Missing the Mark post about last year’s Mega Pro Palette, click here.

I was not surprised to see that LORAC was coming out with another Mega Pro Palette after last year’s sold out so quickly.

They did change the plan a bit, instead of dealing with unhappy customers on their own website, they announced that this palette would be sold exclusively through Ulta. As with every other palette that hits the market, I went ahead and checked in with online reviews from some of the YouTube beauty vloggers I follow (I watched this specific video), and also of course, read the Temptalia review. If you aren’t familiar, Temptalia is a massively popular beauty blog – I trust the content on this blog and if the reports come in on products not being that great, I’m not buying it.

Here’s where the mark was missed. This palette was sent to Temptalia for review before it was released. As a general way to promote your new palette coming out, this is a great idea. However, if the PR people at LORAC were familiar with the in-depth nature of the posts on Temptalia, they should have expected this focus on the price/value situation.

Worth repeating is that this year’s palette contains 0.45 oz., whereas last year’s palette contained 0.62 oz. (the price is the same on both palettes); visually, they appear to be the same size, and the pans still line-up, so I can only guess that the pans themselves are shallower or somehow they tweaked the formula to make it fill the same volume with less product. I was surprised to see such a noticeable difference in quantity, given that they otherwise appear to be the same size.

This is disconcerting, especially since the palettes look identical in terms of product size. On every single palette review that gets posted, Temptalia provides information on how much you are paying per ounce of makeup, so of course there’s going to be a mention about the amount of product dropping so much when the price has stayed the same.

This information, combined with the swatches and overall lukewarm review of the product from xsparkage on YouTube, and I wasn’t interested in this palette any more.

But this isn’t the end of this. When I went back to Temptalia today to pick up the link to use in this post, I noticed the following addition:

Updated 10/5 at 8AM PST: LORAC PR emailed me with the following information: “Similar to all of the brand’s PRO palettes, the shadows in this new one have the same base formulations, pan size/depth and shadow volume. However, the difference in weight is due to the actual weight of the shadow pigment, which varies based on light or darkness of the specific color.”

What a total miss! The Temptalia blog post went up on Sunday, September 27th, and the update was not posted until October 5th. I’m going to assume that Christine from Temptalia would have posted this information as soon as she saw the email from LORAC, which says to me that it took them a week to notice that their product was being questioned. Their answer seems legitimate to me, so why didn’t they think of this to begin with? If you’re going to work with bloggers as a way to get information about your product out there, you need to also be familiar enough with said blogger and their content so that you are responsible for making those collaborations successful. That means knowing enough about their style and format to make sure that your brand and product doesn’t get potentially ruined because you failed to communicate properly.

I can promise you that many readers of Temptalia read that review and certainly didn’t go back to check and see if any more information about the product quantity had emerged. I even decided to go to LORAC’s Twitter to see if they had clarified this point, and they haven’t mentioned it at all.

I understand that a decision had to be made.

  • Do we post publicly about this, and tell all of our fans that there is less weight to the product and hope that it doesn’t dissuade anyone from purchasing?
  • Do we send an update to Temptalia, and randomly hope that the large number of site visitors re-read blog posts that went up a week ago?

I guess the answer is B.

While I was studying marketing in school, something that came up a lot was to work through scenarios when planning PR and advertising. This is the exact sort of thing that should come up and be addressed before anyone can say anything about the change to the palette from last year. It seems that LORAC hasn’t quite grasped this yet.

The Mega Pro 2 Palette is not sold out, and is available at Ulta.

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