At the Personal Care Products Council annual meeting, Susan Babinsky, Senior Vice President of Kline’s Consumer Products and Life Sciences practice, moderated a panel session entitled “Driving the Beauty Industry Forward with Data”. The content and insights shared by the panel provided meeting attendees with insights on how they could take greater advantage of their own and third-party data sources to drive better business performance. Babinsky highlighted how clients are using Kline’s algorithm-based tool Amalgam Digital Beauty Monitor, which rates beauty products to understand who is winning in digital beauty. For instance, Ulta’s own automatic eyeliner brand is among the most recent winners. Conor Begley, the Co-Founder of Tribe Dynamics, shared his firm’s experience on the impact and favorable economics of a winning YouTube video (1 of 100,000 YouTube videos created about the top 200 beauty brands last year) – citing a ~ Manny Mua tutorial for Wet N Wild cosmetics that garnered over 3 million views – equivalent to 54 years of viewing time (half that of a typical $5 million Super Bowl TV ad!). Alison Marino-Cowlishaw, Head of Industry at Google, shared her perspective on the importance of micro influencers and the tool that Google has to offer called Famebit, which is a leading influencer platform that connects brands to creators to reach the mid- and long-tail influencer community. It allows brands to set their own budgets for production, share their business objectives, and manage the data in one platform.
Babinsky explained how to identify and get the inside track on such indie brands as Air Repair, one of the top performers in eye treatments in Kline’s Amalgam Digital Beauty Monitor. Panel member Larry Levin, EVP Consumer & Shopper Insights at Information Resources (IRI), provided customer insights from their own segmentation study, explaining that the “Digitize Me” consumer segment represented 33% of beauty consumers and is the largest and fastest growing segment. Moiz Ali, founder of the indie brand Native—which has been acquired by Procter & Gamble—explained the importance of connecting with consumers and how their feedback proved instrumental in refining and revising product formulations. Babinsky also shared her perspective on how disruptor brands, such as Glossier, are raising the bar via using their social engagement expertise and data derived from that to constantly refine and inform their digital and commercial strategies. Babinsky further noted how brands such as Glossier and Kylie Jenner are clear evidence that entry barriers in beauty are long gone and that among the biggest challenges facing legacy brands today is how to stay relevant and authentic in this indie brand-dominated market.
More on this topic to come in Kline’s upcoming blog on how legacy brands can address this critical challenge.
Request a link for a video of the session coming up in the next two weeks!
