5 Marketing Lessons Bethenny Frankel Learned the Hard Way (So You Don’t Have To)

Seventeen years ago, a multimillion-dollar brand was born before the eyes of 1.13 million TV viewers, and none of them knew it.

It began during the first season of The Real Housewives of New York. In episode six (“Girl’s Night Out”), Bethenny Frankel and Luann de Lesseps are ordering cocktails. “I only drink one drink, and I call it the skinny girl’s margarita,” Frankel announces. “It’s Patron Silver on the rocks, fresh lime juice, and a little splash of triple sec.”

In a year, Frankel launched Skinnygirl cocktails as a brand, starting with a low-calorie, ready-to-drink cocktail. Three years later, spirits giant Beam Suntory acquired it for a reported $120 million.

Of course, a brand doesn’t just come to life from an offhand comment in a restaurant. Frankel is a born entrepreneur. In addition to building Skinnygirl into an empire that includes salad dressings, jeans, and shapewear, Frankel has authored multiple bestsellers, cofounded the wine label Forever Young, launched a podcast called Just B, and runs a disaster-relief nonprofit called B Strong.

But Frankel’s most powerful brand remains herself—or, rather, the innate marketer within.

Her shoot-from-the-hip style and strident opinions on almost any topic (handbags, divorce, government surveillance by drone) have won her a social-media audience of 8.5 million—and growing by double digits. As Frankel has evolved from creating brands to advising them, giants including L’Oreal and McCo Beauty have sought her counsel.

And what sort of guidance does Frankel give? What has she learned in two decades of creating products and promoting them? Frankel sat down with ADWEEK to talk about branding and social media marketing. Obviously, not every brand can get away with the sort of unfiltered content that Frankel whips up, but a marketer can glean plenty from her experiences. She shared five with us.

Always tell the truth

Frankel recalls the occasion when a major beauty brand approached her to do a product—not because she was a makeup expert but because she wasn’t afraid to tell it as she saw it.

“I had compared a $2 drugstore cream to like a $500 cream, and said they’re basically the same, except for one little ingredient,” Frankel recalled.

When creating content—be it marketing or just riffing—”what works the best is humorous chaos with takeaway,” she said.

But the common ingredient in everything?  “Just truth,” she said.

Rough and ready is okay

Slick production values define so much brand marketing, even on social media, but that’s not always what the audience cares about and it’s not always necessary.

As Frankel was building her social-media following, she admits there was a “WTF factor” to her content. Her lighting was bad. Smudges covered the camera lens. But ultimately, it didn’t matter. “I was just playing—[but] I was getting views,” she said. “I was fully going viral.”

So long as the content is relatable, then, viewers will forgive a rough-and-ready presentation.

“If somebody drops off a Cadillac in my driveway,” Frankel added, “I’ll go outside and, in five minutes, I shoot something about what I honestly think about it and post it two seconds later with no editing.”

Talk to your audience, not at them

Frankel thinks back to a shoot for a TV spot where a major brand had hired a director to make sure that she touched on all the key brand attributes and said all the right things.

“He was a lovely person, and he was doing his job, but he wasn’t dealing with me the way that I should be dealt with,” Frankel said.

After hours of supervised shooting, the creative team took Frankel aside five minutes before quitting time and asked her to ditch the script and just improvise in her own voice.

“They were like, ‘Can we just get the unhinged Bethenny for five minutes?’” she remembers.

The takeaway: talk to people like they’re people, not just a demographic target.

Do your homework

Asked what her biggest business mistake was (and what it taught her), Frankel says it’s only a small one—but one she still thinks about.

“This social media person told me—long before [mega influencers like Charli] D’Amelio and Addison Rae—that Tiktok would not be for me because it was for people between eight and 13 years old,” said Frankel, who took the advice.

“I should have just gotten on my phone and been like, let me play around with it,” she said.

As a result, Frankel took up TikTok—where she has 2.4 million followers—later than she’d have liked. “I talk about it more than I should, because we can’t go backwards,” she said. “But it annoys me.”

So don’t take advice from the experts before you check out a strategy on your own.

Your execs may not be the best faces for your brand

In a time of executive biographies, TED talks, and founders-turned-pitchmen, it’s understandable that the company brass would want the limelight.

Well, think twice.

“CEOs or founders want to be in front of the camera and want to be the face of the brand—and they often shouldn’t,” Frankel said. “They want to tell their story, and not everyone wants to hear [it]. People want to hear a business story at a business conference—not in infotainment.”

And since relatively few execs can be Dollar Shave Club’s Michael Dubin, Virgin’s Richard Branson or Apple’s Tim Cook, Frankel admonished, “find the person who speaks the sound bites, is funny and entertaining,” and hire them to represent your brand.