Product Discovery in the Digital and Beauty Retail Landscape
One of the key drivers of shopping at retailers (vs. directly with brands) is the range of products (.. with other aspects like delivery and price). The more younger the generation, the less brand loyalty different studies show them to have. In general, we could say that more than 50% of beauty customers change brands within a year, at least in one category.
But, at the same time, most consumers state that they are confused by the overwhelming options of products. Sephora’s biggest store carries around 13,000 products, and their online shop has more than 300 brands - other beauty retailers being not far behind. As we move to shop mostly through mobile, it brings this problem even bigger with limited space available to present products for the user.
According to a survey of 4,000 consumers in the U.S. and U.K., 48 percent either agree or strongly agree that searching and buying products directly from mobile website is frustrating.
Asked what would encourage consumers to make a purchase on their phone, the leading response was, “If there was a faster or easier browsing experience,” agreed to by 47 percent. That was followed by, “If finding exactly what I wanted was easier,” 44 percent; and, “If discovering new products that I liked was easier,” 35 percent.
Today, experiences from popups to events are leading the beauty retail news. Still, at the same time, the reputation of many beauty retailers is heavily founded on the fact that they carry the newest and coolest brands for consumers to discover.
On the other hand, beauty brands continuously launch various beauty experiences from interactive magic mirrors, customized cosmetics, skin diagnostics, and various other BeautyTech -solutions. These solutions are often found in the retailers' stores, but the challenge for the retailer is to find the balance between providing these experiences together with the brands and solving the customer's central dilemma; product discovery across all of the brands they carry.
From discovery to choosing products and getting them
As a consumer, you're jumping on the latest trends of vegan and cruelty-free skincare or makeup. Going to a retailer like Sephora brings you closer to finding your new favorite product but suddenly, a wall of 20 brands that all or vegan & cruelty-free appear. As consumers, you're happy with the vast selection, but 50% of people still leave without actually making a purchase decision. Why? The brand messaging (even if the brand would have all human & tech advisors) is not as powerful as if the retailer would recommend, e.g., a digital technology.
As consumers, we are not always buying the brand messaging, and we are looking for ways to find the truth about products - especially in cosmetics. YouTube, reviews, and other channels are typical methods to find more information about products. Still, for many, retailer channels are something that they rely on or at least would prefer to get the information from. But are retailers doing enough?
If you look at the main methods discussed - those are the most obvious ones: Optimize your home page, present trending products, provide recommendations from other customers, etc. The unfortunate thing is that in cosmetics, this is less than 50% of the customer journey. Discovering trending products isn't helping to choose what matches their unique skin.
For retail, three steps are the most essential:
Discover - Experiences that drive new product discovery
Choose - Find the products that match me as an individual
Get - Delivery, payments, and other core functionality to get the products quickly to the customer
What can retailers do to help consumers to discover and choose cosmetics?
There are a couple of different kinds of cosmetics shoppers that you need to serve:
- Those who already know (at some level) what they are looking for
- People who don't have a clue what they should get
- People just doing re-purchases
What can you do?
The benefits of different computer vision-driven solutions are helpful for all types of consumers. Imagine if you could scan an image and get the makeup products worn by the person in the picture, or imagine if you could analyze your selfie to get individually matching recommendations from the best matching brands.
Just computer vision is not going to solve all problems related to cosmetics discovery. Choosing the right products but coupled with the correct data about the user (full beauty advisor-experiences) leads you to the right path in helping the consumer find out what they are looking for and something that matches their unique skin. Whether this collection of data happens with questions or looking into users browsing behavior or shopping history - any data available to complement computer vision-driven technologies make the user experience unique and highly individualized.
