After being prompted by the many emails, addressing me so personally and eloquently and flashing the most desirable new beauty products for this holiday season before me, I gave in. I walked into Sephora this past Friday for the V.I.B. 20% sale and spent an amount that my McGill Intro to Information Systems Grader salary only managed to cover about a quarter. Sephora has been known in recent years to really at the top of their e-commerce, omni-channel retailing and beauty technology game. And so I want to look more into that for today’s blog post. After all, if they successfully managed to make me buy $250 within 20 minutes, I must give them some props.
Looking at an article from HBR about “How Sephora Reorganized to Become a More Digital Brand”, chief marketing and digital officer Julie Bornstein detailed the changes made to Sephora to help it evolve digitally. First of all, the importance of having a web development team in-house was highlighted. While the first Sephora.com was an outsourced product, Bornstein made the effort to build a team of digital and web talents, who then in turn constantly improved and optimized the web and mobile experiences of the Sephora website based largely on their own analytics.
In addressing silos in digital, Bornstein emphasized how enmeshing digital at the highest management level is key. It makes sense given that this is something many companies are still struggling with today: legitimizing the need for digital. Once its importance is engrained in top management, it becomes easier to justify the necessary risks and experiments for digital success. With this embodiment of digital, Sephora has taken it one step further with consistent customer- centric thinking, centering brainstorming in the shoes of customers: how would I want to shop? This benefitted Sephora massively as when they first heard of the industry’s forecasts in mobile commerce, they immediately dove head first and were able to be among the first to develop a mobile site for beauty sales.
Sephora’s innovation in digital goes beyond its web presence and has been extending in the store experience since 2012, with the introduction of Color IQ. This technology takes the guesswork out of finding the right foundation and concealer shade by taking images of a customer’s forehead, cheek and neck an calibrating the three photos into one colour composite in 2 minutes. The resulting Color IQ number can then be used to pull up the best matches of foundations, lip colours and concealers that match the customer’s skin tone. This Color IQ number can also be inputted on the Sephora website to retrieve online product results.
It’s evident that Sephora’s digital success is highly reliant on having strong top management support and investment in digital, a risk-taking attitude and a design thinking approach to digital. These are definitely things that beauty and even other retailers alike should keep in mind when trying to devise their strategy for linking the online presence with the in-store experience.
No comments:
Post a Comment