Euromonitor Podcast on Digital Trends in Beauty: If We All Already Know These Basics, How Do We Differentiate?

In preparation for my participation in the L'Oreal Brandstorm competition, whose focus this year is on developing an integrated digital strategy for La Roche Posay, I was looking into some Euromonitor analyses on what makes a successful digital strategy and ended up listening to a podcast that focuses on this topic. It was actually surprising to find that the research mentioned aren’t that much of a surprise to what I’ve already learned through my work at Vain Pursuits. 

The four pillars for a digital strategy in beauty were noted to be: engagement, personalization, curation and best price. The Euromonitor analyst emphasized the importance of having a holistic approach and thinking of overall brand development through the digital strategy. In terms of engagement, the advantages of conversing with customers were highlighted, being that this allows marketers to harness more data on customers’ behaviours and their beauty regimes and that it can lead to higher brand loyalty as customers’ needs are more accurately identified and met. Personalization is no doubt another obvious pillar, as customers are looking for more tailored solutions especially when it comes to skincare. What surprised me was that the two main trends identified to address this pillar were virtual try on and skin analysis, trends that I have already been familiar with, from learning about L’Oreal’s Makeup Genius App to being highly acquainted with Vain Pursuits’ business model. 

This podcast itself did not present me with any revolutionary ideas or findings. However, it has led me to consider an important question: how salient have the successful factors of digital in beauty become? In a sense, it seems almost like most digital marketing individuals and brands have caught on to what people want. We see apps and brands incorporating augmented reality growing by the day and there isn’t really anything that you can’t get personalized, particularly in beauty. How exactly then, can a beauty brand differentiate itself on digital and find the disruptive technology that will propel it in this saturated digital beauty playing field? This is something I really hope to find out soon,  as I know my Brandstorm fate is heavily dependent on the answer. 

HBR Digital Customer Engagement: L'Oreal Innovating the Customer Decision Journey with Makeup Genius

After spending an inspiring weekend in Boston to attend the Harvard Women in Business conference, I ended the trip well with the purchase of the latest Harvard Business Review issue, which has a focus on digital customer engagement. One of the key parts that caught my attention in the segment was the focus on “streamlining the decision journey”, striving to deliver customers directly into the loyalty loop and keeping them in there. 

The main example illustrated in the article is the L’Oreal Makeup Genius app, an app launched in 2014 with over 14 million downloads that allows customers to virtually try on makeup at home using augmented reality. The recognition technology can capture 64 facial data points and 100 different facial expressions to flawlessly apply makeup onto the face. The user can then save their photo with the makeup on, purchase the products in the app through retailers like Amazon and directly share their latest look to social media. The app’s functionality extends beyond the purchasing decision in that after the customer’s purchase arrives, she can reopen the app and it will automatically give her instructions for applying the products. The app then stores data on the styles that the customer appears interested in and will periodically alert her of a new style she might like. Through several more purchases and a greater awareness of her preferences, the app can further tailor the recommendations sent. It has been analyzed that this interaction helps to cultivate customer loyalty and encourage the sharing of app links to friends who have similar interests in beauty. 

I think this app is an exemplary example of combining the four key capabilities of effective customer path to purchase journey, as highlighted through the HBR article: automation, proactive personalization, contextual interaction and journey innovation. It definitely highlights the rapidly growing importance of personalization in all aspects of a customer’s purchasing experience and how when this is delivered effectively through digital technology, it can create a loyal retained customer.  

Sources: 

https://hbr.org/2015/11/competing-on-customer-journeys

Luxury Fashion Brands in the E-Commerce Competitive Landscape

Luxury fashion brands that have traditionally heavily relied on fancy flagship stores and distribution through department stores are shifting their competitive landscapes. It’s no surprise that many notable brands like LVMH and Hugo Boss are actively developing their own e-commerce platforms now that it is evident that shopping behaviours are migrating online and the growth in the Chinese luxury retail market is slowing. The result is a new competition ground between these brands’ own e-commerce sites and the department store e-commerce sites that they typically sell through. 

I personally found it very interesting to see such a big move for luxury to e-commerce, given the fact that luxury fashion is a high-effort purchase that normally involves more in-person engagement with the product prior to purchasing. However, it is definitely worth nothing that it is predicted that the “web sales of luxury goods will grow at more than twice the pace of the overall luxury market, to 27 billion euros ($30 billion) through 2019”. It seems likely that luxury brands will increasingly utilize the “showroom” strategy whereby using their existing stores and outlets as a means for consumers to interact with the products but aiming to drive conversions and repeat sales through e-commerce. 

I believe it’s important to note that moving the luxury fashion market online doesn’t just provide brands with another channel to sell through. With the various metrics and data collection mediums available, there is a vast amount of customer data that these brands can collect through consumers’ e-commerce and mobile behaviour to better understand how to adapt their online strategies. There’s also much experimenting to be done to see whether brands should focus on selling through their own e-commerce sites or work closely with their department store distributors to build a stronger presence on their websites. As the luxury retail online continues to grow in the near future, it's interesting to consider whether an e-commerce storefront can ever render the luxury storefront obsolete.

Article inspiration source: http://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/news-analysis/luxury-web-battle-looms-as-lvmh-hugo-boss-develop-e-commerce

Shopify's "Buy Now" on Twitter

This morning I briefly came across an article about the new “buy now” button on Twitter. It definitely intrigued me but it was not until I actually sat down tonight to look at the fashion-tech news that I truly considered the implications of this, not only for e-commerce retailers, but for the future trajectory of social media as a whole. 

Shopify is a Canadian based company that develops software for online stores and retail POS systems. It has a range of clients from emerging startups like fashion brand Good As Gold to growing small businesses like Skinny Teatox. With the new partnership with Twitter, Shopify merchants can tweet any product and it will include the buy button that lets users “make purchases within their Twitter timeline”. Similar buttons have already been implemented for Pinterest and Facebook.

As a frequent e-commerce shopper and aspiring digital marketer myself, I recognize the importance of social media platforms as a way of reaching out to potential customers and convincing them to convert. However at the same time, I am really thinking about how this trend of “buy now” buttons everywhere will come to impact the quality of content and interactions by these brands on social media. Especially for fashion and beauty brands, I believe that it is extremely important to cultivate a strong connection with customers and communicate with them the brand’s story and lifestyle as a part of leading the customer on the path to purchase. With more and more of these features that allow customers to purchase directly from social media sites, I feel as if the opportunities for true customer relationship development may be hindered, if companies are not careful in using it. I agree that to a great extent, it becomes very convenient for customers to click a button and be led to purchase. Yet at the same time if brands focus too much on just generating the click to purchase and ease off on still enhancing the various touchpoints with the customer, what they may end up facing is a series of one-time purchases, but not high customer retention. 

With the current movement of technology and mobile, it is inevitable that our apps will only continue to be crowded with “buy now!”, “click this!”, “go here!” call to actions. What I feel is extremely critical though is that companies do not take this as a means of being lazy and just bombarding timelines with “buy now!” Tweets. They must continuously strive to build on their brand stories and give potential customers a reason to come back! 

The Struggles of Instagram E-Commerce at a Skincare Startup

This week at my work as the junior digital marketer for the beauty startup Vain Pursuits, I was put in a position to deeply consider how a user’s path to purchase actually works on Instagram. Through the past four months, I’ve been focusing on a rebranding strategy for Vain Pursuits’ Instagram feed, featuring more lifestyle shots and bringing in Instagram influencers as brand ambassadors. Our initial growth in followers and engagement in June was high and we were thrilled to see a few conversion to sales. However these days, there are symptoms showing that this initial plan is no longer capturing users’ attention as we planned it to. Our number of followers have relatively plateaued and engagement rates per post are decreasing. 

Looking at an article from Adweek detailing how to turn Instagram into a revenue channel, it was reinforced that “when presenting your products on Instagram, you can’t just sell. You have to inspire.” This is something that I’ve picked up on a long time ago, just by being a regular Instagram user and Instagram brand shopper myself. The problem that now exists is how do we capture Vain Pursuits skincare in a way that inspires people to buy? It is evident through analytics that just taking shots of the products themselves is not very effective, as consumers cannot envision themselves using the products. I closely studied how Frank Body, an extremely successful coffee body scrub from Melbourne have done their Instagram photos. Bringing in $20 million in revenues the past year through just Instagram as the acquisition channel, it is no surprise that Frank Body knows quite a few things about how to best showcase your products subtly and stir enough curiosity to drive sales. 

Frank’s advantage is by having a strong brand personality through personifying the coffee scrub as a flirty guy. Although this is not completely relevant to what Vain Pursuits does, it can be inferred that we definitely need a stronger and bolder tone of voice in the captions of our Instagram posts. At the same time, the photo posts themselves need to feature more faces and beautiful models. The truth is, Instagram is a place where action is taken based on aspiration. “The aspirational nature of Instagram is driving desire, and that desire dries sales” and so we must devise a new kind of photo-taking and photo styling approach that shows a sexier side of our skincare that our target market consumers would better take in.

It’s crazy that a simple app for viewing photos is actually a complicated science in itself. Successful Instagram e-commerce is a combination of consumer behaviour and intensive visual content marketing. Even though it can be a lot of work sometimes, this is the type of marketing puzzle that I want to solve every day in my future digital marketing career. 

Link to Adweek article: http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/how-to-turn-instagram-into-a-revenue-channel/627189

L'Oreal Canada in the E-Commerce Scene

This past week was full of a whirlwind of events. However, one of the most memorable moments was definitely speaking with L’Oreal Canada at the Desautels Career Fair about their opportunities in digital marketing and e-commerce. This experience inspired me to look more into how L’Oreal successfully manages multiple brands on e-commerce right now.

I came across an article and video that discuss the partnership between L’Oreal and OSF Global Services, an e-commerce technology services provider. It was interesting to see that L’Oreal decided to outsource the development of an e-commerce platform instead of developing it in-house. The company had the goal of replatforming multiple brands within a limited time frame and thus it was more feasible to collaborate with a specialized and innovative firm. This actually relates as a nice example to what my INSY 333 class discussed last week about firms outsourcing software development when it is not part of their core competency, or when they need the final deliverable within a short time frame. Through working with OSF, L’Oreal was able to deploy four brands including Biotherm, Shu Uemura, Clarisonic and Kerastase within 3 months per brand onto the “core architecture” created.

What intrigued me was the concept of “responsive design”, which OSF implemented to meet L’Oreal’s requirement of a clean and sleek design that not only attracts, but engages customers on the sites. Responsive design “suggests that design and development should respond to the user’s behavior and environment based on screen size, platform and orientation”. I find it so fascinating how everything revolves around the user nowadays. May it be an e-commerce site or even just an overall digital marketing strategy, a push strategy is pretty much completely out of the picture, while the possible dimensions of a pull strategy continuously increase as new opportunities arise to interact with consumers in various aspects of tech.

I would say the key takeaway is that digital is evidently changing the retail landscape, and it’s here to stay. Even a large beauty company like L’Oreal that has traditionally relied on B2B selling to retailers has immersed in the e-commerce scene to greatly increase their conversion rates and revenues. This is only the beginning to a lot more change that digital will bring.

Links:
http://www.osf-global.com/company/newsroom/osf-helped-l-oreal-achieve-a-double-digit-increase-in-sales
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/01/guidelines-for-responsive-web-design/

When Tinder Meets Uber- For the Modeling Industry

Welcome to my first blog post for e-business. I don't want to bore you right off the bat, but I also want to make sure that you know the nitty-gritty of what common theme to expect among the many more future posts to come. I love the fashion and beauty industries (original for a girl, I know), but what I love even more is understanding how tech and anything digital are shaping these industries and changing the way traditional business models operate. And even more specifically, how the e-commerce and digital marketing scene works in the businesses of these two industries. Let's get started, shall we? 

It’s not every day that you have a friend excitedly sending you an article on Facebook saying “OMG your ex-boss is on Business of Fashion!”, but that’s exactly what happened a few days ago. I interned at a modeling agency in New York called Silent Models last summer and little did I know that one of the intern duties of testing out a new app my boss was secretly developing would one day become one of the headline articles in BoF’s “Fashion-Tech” section. 

When I first played around with Swipecast, identifying bugs and weaknesses of the UI, the app idea intrigued me a lot. While the app’s current analogy is “Uber for models”, as detailed in the article, I bet few people know that it started out more with the concept of “Tinder for models”. In the earlier concept, the idea was to have models upload their profiles and for casting agents to swipe through models looking for work, much like how users of Tinder do based on judgments of appearances. It was extremely interesting for me to see how this initial idea was eventually adopted to the current “Uber for models” approach whereby models upload a portfolio and casting agents filter them based on preferences such as height and hair colour, and can send booking requests, much like how you would send one for an Uber driver. 

The UI of Swipecast

With the emergence and fast-paced growth of social media and disruptive technologies to support and even become the primary platform of many traditional businesses and e-businesses, it really makes me reflect on the growing impact of technology on multisided platforms, and how this creates new business opportunities that could never exist years ago. With apps like Swipecast, aspiring models can easily gain more exposure and job opportunities while budget-tight fashion brands have more options in economically casting their campaigns. 

However at the same time, it is also clear that this kind of technology can’t completely replace the human interactions required in booking big modeling jobs. There are still many key considerations such as the level of accountability or the model’s ability to move and interact on set. 

At the end of the day, I think examples like Swipecast in fashion industry push us to deeply consider, to what extent mobile technology can change the ways traditional business models work, and shift work to a more digital basis without jeopardizing the value of human interactions.

Link to the article: http://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/fashion-tech/modelling-apps-swipecast-feels-instagram