Marketing Miss America

LAKEWOOD – The Miss America Pageant has a marketing problem.

Ashley Hatfield, the reigning Miss Illinois, polled her audience Wednesday at a luncheon at Turnberry Country Club in Lakewood for Women of the World, a local nonprofit business organization.  

“Who here knows who Miss America is?” Hatfield asked.

Not a soul in the audience of about 50 women – employees and executives from local financial services firms, insurance companies, Fortune 500 companies – knew the name of the country’s reigning Miss America, Lauren Nelson of Oklahoma.

And that’s the problem, according to Hatfield, a 24-year-old native of downstate Anna, who will head to Las Vegas next month to compete for one of the country’s top pageant titles.

Organizers of the pageant, which is separate from the Donald Trump-owned Miss USA competition, said this year’s contest would be “a renewed competition that will redefine what it takes to be Miss America – a relatable and individual ‘it girl’ who can connect with today’s modern woman.”

Hatfield, along with  51 other finalists, recently filmed a reality show that will air in the weeks before the Jan. 26 competion.

“The basic premise is that it’s time for [the] Miss America [pageant] to have a reality check, because [it’s] no longer relevant,” Hatfield said.

In January, the Miss America pageant brought in 2.4 million viewers, an all-time low, and less than 10 percent of the pageant’s TV audience in the late 1980s.

The competition’s increasing irrelevance is partly because few Americans know what the pageant winners do with their platform, and partly because members of its core audience – women – have become its chief critics.

“The reason we’re no longer relevant is because women have evolved,” Hatfield said.

And they think pageants are all about evening gowns and bathing suits.

Miss America contestants spend the months leading up to the national competition traveling through their respective states, making public speeches, talking to students, visiting hospitals, and raising money for the nonprofit Miss America Organization, which donated $45 million in scholarships last year, Hatfield said.

The pageant, with its gown procession and bathing-suit competition, is “probably the most irrelevant thing we do,” she said.

Hatfield encouraged the local business women in the audience to spread the word about the scholarship organization, and its retinue of participants who, she said, represented the kind of role models sorely lacking in the current cultural spotlight.

Hatfield has a Master’s degree in speech pathology from the University of Mississippi and has spent time working in hospitals and in low-income school districts in Mississippi.

“We need to put Miss America ... back into the forefront,” she said.

Her marketing message rang true with Norine Wiebmer, a networking specialist based in Lake in the Hills, who had a difficult time finding contestants for the Algonquin and Lake in the Hills pageant, despite the lack of a swimsuit or gown competition.

“We had a couple grand we couldn’t get rid of,” Wiebmer said.

Wiebmer said the beauty pageant stereotype masked the truth of pageant contestants’ competence. She would recommend that employers specifically seek out pageant contestants, she said.

“These girls are going to be top leaders,” she said.

More info

The reality TV series “Miss America: Reality Check” premieres Jan. 4 at 10 p.m. on TLC, and will air the next four Friday nights, leading up to the Miss America pageant at 8 p.m. Sat., Jan. 26.

The series brings all 52 contestants under one roof to “undo everything they have learned about pageant basics.”