Part IV.
Key Challenges & Pain Points
Part V.
Current Adoption & Usage of Technology
Part VI. Consumer Trends & Behaviour
Part II. Assessment of Organisation's Performance
Company overview
Data source: Craft
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Data source: Google Trends
Areas of high performance
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Online engagement with an average of 800k monthly visitors to the website
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In 2016, Glossier tracked its growth of sales by 600% (Radicle, 2017)
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In 2016, active customer growth of 560% (Radicle, 2017)
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Social media management
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Marketing strategy
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Bold and well-positioned aesthetic, brand identity, culture and vision
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Strong loyal fan base and engaged social community
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Outstanding public relations strategies with digital media partnerships
Areas of low performance
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The biggest challenge for the retail industry right now is customer experience (NRF, 2018)
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Limited retail strategy
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Shipping is limited to certain countries and company may be struggling to expand globally
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Difficulties regarding scaling and managing supply chain
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Brand must work towards digital innovations to stay competitive
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Building analytics stack to keep up with rapid growth (Segment, 2017)
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Measuring link between customer behaviour and e-commerce revenue (Segment, 2017)
Key Performance Indicators
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While the business model relies on selling products online, Glossier’s overarching strategy relies on shared customer experience while revenue growth and acquiring new customers is secondary to this approach.
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KPIs are measured by looking at where sales originate using Analytics and Business Intelligence tools, such as Amplitude, Yahoo Analytics, Google Analytics, Heap, and Segment (Craft, 2019)
Part III. Evaluation of Key Competitors
Performance of major beauty industry players internationally
Sephora
In relation to digital innovation, Sephora provides in-store playground called Innovation Lab. It currently uses Color IQ and Sephora Virtual Artist to help their customers.
Furthermore, Sephora applied Modiface software and services to create AR technology for their apps, web e-commerce and in-store AR mirrors (Modiface, 2019). Digital Trend Tables display the store’s best-selling and best-reviewed products in real time (Digiday, 2016).
Estée Lauder
Estée Lauder’ Global Education Team has joint forces with Perfect Corp developer company in 2017 to launch their first augmented reality education program. With the use of YouCam technology, their goal is to provide live AR training sessions to more than 17,000 beauty advisors across the globe.
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Training program - private and interactive channel with real-time trainings and product briefings. Beauty advisors are enabled to virtually try out products on their mobile platforms and give feedback on the virtual try-out featured looks throughout the training (The Star, 2017).
L’Oreal
The company collaborates with Facebook and use their social media platform via the earlier acquired Modiface AR tech company in order to enable consumers to virtually try on Maybelline, L’Oreal Paris or NYX makeups. Their goal is to reshape the customers’ beauty experience (Premium Beauty News, 2018).
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YouCam Makeup augmented reality app - 3D makeup and skin analyser that assists consumers to find the right range, product or shade.
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Style My Hair (AR) app - 3D hair colour testers used by consumers and hairdressers. This embodies the Professional Products Division’s conviction that “hair colour is the new makeup” (L'Oréal, 2017).
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As for Milk Makeup, they switched to Commerce Cloud (Beauty Packaging, 2018), delivering shoppable videos, product imagery and personalized promotional offers for consumers optimized for mobile.
Performance of challenger beauty companies
Part IV.
Key Challenges & Pain Points
Companies like L’Oréal Group that own the majority of the beauty market (L’Oréal Group, 2017) have established brands and greater resources for R&D activities as well as greater budget for marketing.
Accenture found that Millennials can be “exceptionally loyal”, however demanding, customers. Such conglomerates have greater resources to constantly innovate and deliver better shopping experience. Glossier needs to be more selective in terms of resource allocation.
Conglomerates as competition
The channels of reaching the customers
Glossier needs to find a way to improve their consumer behaviour analytics, as it is one of their main pain points. Marketers need to know how customers as individuals or as groups interact with their products and digital content, what are the key events that prompt them to purchase a product and what attributes of products are of greater importance to them (Solomon, 2009). This will allow Glossier to adjust their strategy to align their actions with the needs of their target customers.
Understanding consumer behaviour
Data analytics
Part V.
Current Adoption & Usage of Technology
Technology, social media, and data analytics
This engagement with digital technology to create a 300% growth in 2017 (Sonsev, 2018) has dubbed Glossier the disruptors of the beauty industry. A digital presence is important for Glossier, given it only has stores in 1 out of the 7 countries it sells in and demonstrates the success of their social-media strategy despite no physical location where customers can try products (Pallud, 2018).
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Data analytics is another important part of their tech adoption. As Glossier’s creation comes from popular blog Into the Gloss, they currently use data platform Segment to analyse movement around and across the two sites. They want to see how and why people navigate from the community to e-commerce site (Milnes, 2017).
However, despite its ‘disruptor’ status, Glossier is not an industry leader in technology. Incumbent beauty companies have been quick to adopt the latest user experiences by buying digital startups. Sephora, L’Oreal and Ultra Beauty are all including augmented reality (AR) into their user experience, whether this be through their mobile apps or AR mirrors in store (Modiface, 2019). Glossier is yet to even develop an e-commerce app. Similarly, their customer engagement is yet to extend beyond social-media.
Meanwhile, YouCam users benefit from 1 on 1 beauty advice (Perfect Corp, 2019). Glossier would benefit from expanding its technology adoption to keep up with large competitors and attract and interact with its global customers.
Part VI.
Consumer Trends & Behaviour