How to amplify the power of consumer insights
Introduction:
In the fiercely competitive personal care industry, where brands vie for consumer attention, the key to success lies in understanding and connecting with the target audience. Consumer research and insights are invaluable tools that can help personal care brands gain a competitive edge and thrive in this dynamic market. By delving into the behaviors, preferences and needs of consumers, brands can tailor their products, marketing strategies, and overall consumer experience to create meaningful connections and drive brand loyalty. In this article, we will explore the pivotal role of consumer research and insights within the personal care industry, focusing on how collaboration through insights can empower brands to better serve their consumers and stand out in a crowded marketplace.
In addition to discussing the benefits of collaboration through insights, this article will also explore best practices gained through such collaboration. These topics include:
· The evolving role of pandemic-based research
· The importance and complexity of surveying younger generations
· Consumers’ evolving focus on sustainability
· How investing in and collaborating through consumer insights delivers value far beyond established research budgets
Personal care brands poised for success recognize the value of consumer insights as a collaborative tool to elevate their brands and foster meaningful connections with their target audiences.
Mass, Luxury, or Boutique – all personal care brands benefit from consumer insights
While many personal care brands have their own consumer insights teams, collaboration with external consumer research experts can provide an added and useful perspective. These collaborations offer brands a different view of consumer insights that complements their own research. By accessing insights generated by ingredient innovators, packaging materials experts, and successful retailers, personal care brands can achieve a more comprehensive understanding of their target audience, leading to more informed decision-making and greater success in the market.
Smaller, independent personal care brands can particularly benefit from consumer insights. With their agility and ability to move quickly, these brands can pair their own insights with those from external insights professionals to make informed decisions on product features, marketing strategies, channel selection, messaging, promotion, and more. Collaborating through research can help build road maps for smaller brands to convert consumer insights into quick action. Seeking and leveraging insights from industry experts allows these brands to compete effectively against larger, more established brands and gain speed to meet consumer expectations, even without large internal research teams or budgets.
Larger, more established personal care brands aim to set trends rather than follow consumer preferences. This approach is successful for a select group of brands and requires a careful understanding of the gap between the brand's trend-setting vision and their consumers’ reality. Since these brands are more likely to have larger in-house insights teams, cross-value chain collaboration with other research teams can give brands nuanced and adjacent insights that enhance their differentiation. For these brands, acquiring a deeper appreciation for consumer acceptance of their market-leading vision can help fine tune go-to-market strategies and reduce adoption time.
The future of consumer research is about collaboration. By bringing together consumer insights professionals from different parts of the value chain, such as those at ingredient makers, brands, and retailers, a shared and more complex understanding of consumers can be developed. This collaboration transfers knowledge, maximizes resources, fosters innovation, and enables personal care brands to create products and experiences that are not only differentiated but that also truly resonate with consumers.
As the personal care industry advocates for collaboration through insights, consumer research experts will continue teaching and learning from each other; building networks and knowledge bases that set the foundation for new product development and the creation of better consumer experiences.
Here are a few things I’ve learned through insights collaboration with value chain partners.
A new spin on “pre- and post-pandemic” research
In 2021 and 2022, no matter the sector, our research asked consumers about their post-COVID behaviors and how they differed from their pre-COVID behaviors. The insights were helpful to many across each sector’s value chain and enabled more efficient and relevant ways to operate in a post-pandemic world. Today, consumers have settled back into their regular routines. And even though some aspects of their routines are different because of the pandemic, the daily life of most consumers does not closely resemble what it was in 2020, 2021 and even 2022. Five years on, consumers carry the scars of the pandemic, but its effects are no longer ever-present or influencing their lives in new and direct ways each day.
The lasting impressions of the pandemic should be considered in today’s consumer research design. But not in the way you may think. Asking consumers about pre- and post-pandemic opinions and behaviors is not where consumer researchers should be focusing. The pandemic experience and post-pandemic life should now be a filter or context applied to interpret new consumer insights.
As new collaborations begin, it is helpful for each individual insights team to look back at their own research conducted during the pandemic. By revisiting the data, teams can not only map consumer trends but more importantly build new consumer profiles that include recent research. This allows collaborators to understand how each insights team interpreted their real time pandemic research. Sharing these points of view can reveal new insights, showing the evolution of consumers over time. Our job is no longer to monitor how COVID is changing the daily behaviors and choices of consumers. It is to understand how the pandemic has changed consumers and put them on a new path of lasting behaviors and preferences.
A good way to explain this is by generational cohort. The average age of Gen Z consumers during the global lock down (2020-2022) was 16 years old; the average age of Baby Boomers during the same time frame was 66 years old. Each group was at a different phase of life during these 3 years. Collectively mapping and then comparing pre- and post-pandemic insights by generational cohort can be extremely valuable to understand the lasting ways the lock down has impacted their opinions, usage, and expectations of personal care products.
The importance of younger generations and the complexity in capturing their preferences
It is very important to include all generational groups in consumer research for the personal care industry. Skin care, sun care, hair care, and color cosmetics are universal product categories used by all consumers. As older Millennials are aging past 40 years old, researchers are expanding focus to understand the buying power and preferences of younger generations. This includes both Generation Z (12-27 years old) and Generation Alpha (up to 11 years old). Gen Alpha is emerging as a generational cohort of interest long before they mature to the age of their full buying power. Skin care has become an obsession for this cohort and researchers across the value chain are desperate to learn more about what is driving their fascination and hypothesize how it may change as they mature to teenagers and young adults.
Collaboration among consumer insights experts can help to address the challenges we face in surveying Generation Alpha. The age of consent differs by country and recruiting through parental consent adds time and cost to research projects. Also, when we do access Generation Alpha and ask them questions about skin care, there is concern about the quality of their answers. Survey design and chosen methodologies need to consider this group’s lack of experience with shopping, price comparisons, product features, and even reading and comprehension.
As consumer researchers we partner with exceptional vendors to design and execute our research. This means that when we collaborate with other insights professionals, we can gain knowledge from a larger vendor pool. This can be a crucial benefit as we design research to better capture the details of Generation Alpha. Global vendors are creating and using new methods to execute research suited to this group. Using actions young consumers already understand, surveys are now including activities like swiping right and left instead of traditional ranking questions and timed thumbs-up and -down exercises to gamify the data collection process.
The collaboration of consumer insights professionals across the personal care value chain allows us to share more than our data and the resulting insights. We can compare, share, and develop best practices, processes, vendor recommendations, and more. This deeper facet of collaboration not only enables us to conduct better research but builds stronger value chain relationships where we can better serve the needs of consumers.
Consumers’ evolving focus on sustainability
Through our research, we see growth in consumers’ understanding of the environmental issues our world is facing. Data shows that consumers are making connections about how their behaviors impact our planet. Many consumers feel pressure to live a sustainable lifestyle and feel overwhelmed about what that means. As they purchase and use personal care products, consumers expect brands to offer more sustainable options and to make it easier for them to purchase high quality, sustainable items.
For personal care brands to help consumers navigate the overwhelming and complex topic of sustainability, they first need to know how consumers define it. Collaboration between consumer insights teams across the value chain offers an advantage to complete this task.
We all know this for certain: consumers do not all define sustainability in the same way. And consumer insights teams at ingredient companies, brands and retailers play different roles in the sustainability story of the personal care industry. We each are conducting research from our point in the value chain to better understand consumer opinions about the sustainability factors we influence. Putting these sustainability insights together helps the value chain collaborate toward holistic solutions. When we understand what consumers know (or don’t know) about sustainability, we can execute strategies that meet them where they are and then educate them as part of their buying experience, leading them to the conclusion they seek – to have more sustainable product choices.
Insights teams from ingredient suppliers can share which types of ingredients consumers associate with sustainable personal care products. Their insights can reveal the ingredients consumers consider most sustainable and those they want and expect brands to use in sun, skin, hair and cosmetics products. Packaging companies can share their insights about the materials, pack designs and end-of-life details that consumers consider sustainable. Even if the research shows consumers are uninformed about what makes personal care packaging more sustainable, sharing this research will give brands additional information to confirm or edit their packaging decisions and allow them to then leverage the insights to best message the sustainable benefits to consumers. The consumer insights generated by personal care brands about their finished products and how consumers perceive their sustainability efforts are extremely valuable to the collaboration process.
When value chain collaborators put these insights together, each member can deliver better solutions. Personal care brands who leverage consumer insights from across the industry, will fully understand what sustainability means to consumers. Pairing these insights with their own expertise will give brands the advantage to innovate products consumers want to use and feel good about buying.
Investing and collaborating through insights will add efficiency
Investing in consumer insights is an insurance policy with a certain return on investment. Executing consumer research and generating insights is not without effort. Depending on the projects and objectives, this process requires the effort of talented people, a considerable amount of time and money. When done right, however, the investments in consumer research will be far lower than the money needed to fix the inevitable errors that result from uninformed product development, consumer segmentation, channel selection and promotion choices. Collaboration through insights adds another layer of insurance without the need for additional monetary investments.
Consumer insights are a crucial input for product development teams. Detailed information about what consumers expect from personal care products can help brands avoid innovating in the wrong direction. Consumer input lowers the risks of focusing on irrelevant or outdated product features consumers do not value. Without conducting consumer research to guide product innovation, the risk of wasting time and money increases. Product development is time consuming and expensive—from lab time and testing, to scale up, packaging, marketing, and distribution of new products. Without proactive consumer research, brands may realize product and launch mistakes too late. This is an expensive lesson to learn. The investment in consumer research to test most important product features, satisfaction gaps, desired experiences, and willingness to pay would be a fractional investment compared to an unsuccessful product release. Brands who pair their pre-launch insights with those from other value chain partners will have an added layer of security. Consumer research focused on personal care ingredients, packaging, and retail experiences will increase launch effectiveness.
Developing, launching and promoting sustainable products is difficult. Knowledge of how consumers define sustainability and how it influences their purchase decisions are required for brands to be successful. Sustainability in the personal care market is a complex and wide-reaching topic. Therefore, it would be almost impossible for individual personal care brands to fully understand consumers’ purchase drivers for sustainable products through their own consumer research. Collaborating with insights professionals across the personal care value chain is an effective option for brands to frame sustainability in ways consumers will care about and respond to.
Offering sustainable products without such insights can negatively impact timelines and budgets as well as cause irreparable damage to personal care companies. As brands incorporate sustainability into their consumer-facing initiatives, they should make sure their strategies are aligned with the needs of their target consumers. For example, educating and messaging consumers on sustainable manufacturing processes may not convert into loyalty if the consumer target believes that formulation ingredients and packaging materials define sustainability. Promoting clean products and highlighting clean ingredients may not drive product sales if consumers have shifted their focus to natural or upcycled ingredients. Promoting sustainability certifications from 3rd parties may not add credibility to brand perception if consumers are unaware of the certification body or do not find it compelling. These examples show how proactive and collaborative use of consumer insights can strengthen the sustainable products and messages of personal care brands positioning them for success.
In the personal care space, capturing consumer opinions about the features and benefits of products is extremely valuable. There is equal value in gathering opinions about advertising and promotional campaigns. Understanding the messages and visuals that will resonate with consumers before executing the campaign is a universally executed step in the process, but one that can be omitted due to time and budget constraints. This type of research is one that is ideal for collaboration across the personal care value chain. There are multiple dimensions to test, including the tone and trustworthiness of messaging and the attractiveness and usefulness of photography and video. Understanding the information channels consumers trust and prefer to learn about new products will ensure smart media buys and concentrate funds toward the most relevant media platforms. Lastly, comparative testing that reveals consumers’ preferred engagement actions (likes, swipes, shares, clicks, purchases, etc.) should also be included in pre-campaign research. The insights from these data will uncover ways to reach consumers more directly and create an enjoyable experience that increases their loyalty. This consumer testing is a crucial investment for the long-term health of personal care brands. Advertising and promotional mistakes are costly, and some can cause severe or even irreparable brand damage. Investing in ways to prevent misjudgments will save time, add efficiency, and preserve campaign budgets. More importantly it will strengthen brands and give them a competitive edge in today’s crowded personal care market.
Conclusion
Collaboration between consumer insights teams across the personal care value chain is a powerful catalyst for innovation and exceptional consumer experiences. By sharing research and insights, brands can gain a deeper understanding of their target audience and make informed decisions that give them a competitive edge.
Collaboration goes beyond the traditional approach, resulting in insights that surpass the sum of its parts. By partnering with external experts, brands can gain fresh perspectives and complement their own research efforts. This collaboration is valuable for both smaller brands looking to compete against larger players and for prestigious brands aiming to fine-tune their market-leading vision.
Committing to consumer research and collaborating through insights is an investment with a high rate of return. It helps brands avoid costly mistakes in product development, marketing, and promotion by leveraging an advanced understanding of consumer expectations and preferences to inform decisions and enable success.
Want to learn more about collaboration through consumer insights? I’m always interested in new collaboration partnerships that drive change and move innovation forward. If you are working in the beauty or personal care industries and are interested in collaborating through consumer insights to drive results, contact me!