Beauty rituals such as skincare and make-up date back to ancient times — over 7000 years ago, to be precise — and enjoyed by almost every culture in the world. Then came the rise of the Hollywood starlet which saw entrepreneurs Elizabeth Arden and Max Factor bring skincare and makeup brands to the mass market. Today, skincare and makeup brands and products are enjoyed by women on a multitude of levels: they inspire confidence, they are the base for hundreds of new and creative looks, they allow for reinvention and they facilitate wellbeing and self-care. Measuring brand awareness is important to see which make-up brands continue to reach the mass market.
Measuring Brand Awareness for Make-up Brands in the UK
As beauty brand managers, you’d be aware that women are the biggest consumers globally of both skincare and makeup products. It’s your job to make sure they choose your brand and the challenge is how to make your brand stand out in a multi-billion dollar industry that’s incredibly noisy.
How?
By using brand tracking to get those data-driven insights about your audience and marketing accordingly towards them. More specifically, by measuring brand awareness for these brands.
Let’s jump in and see how brand-aware British women are and see if these relatively new makeup brands are making waves in a saturated beauty market.
Measuring Brand Awareness: The Results
We recently asked 1000 respondents in the UK about three relatively new makeup brands ( Milk, Glossier, and the Ordinary) so we could set about measuring brand awareness for each brand, and to see for which niche audience it was at its highest.
Using brand tracking data, we were able to get a closer snapshot at the types of women who’d purchase these brands, their brand awareness and brand consideration as well as age, level of income and employment details.
Milk Makeup
Milk Makeup is a cruelty-free vegan makeup brand hailing from New York City. Measuring brand awareness within the general British female population, Milk’s showed 7%. They ranked 50% for brand consideration.
Measuring Brand Awareness — Age
There was a difference of brand awareness between different age groups, ranging from 11% for the 18–45-year-olds and dropping to 9% for the 46–65-year-olds. Perhaps Milk could run a marketing campaign tailored towards their older demographic? With so little difference in brand awareness, it may be worth trying.
Measuring Brand Awareness — Income
Using this data, we can go a little further into our audience. Taking the younger age group as our sample, those falling into the higher income rank at 12% when measuring brand awareness, and 11% for the lower-income bracket — not that much of a significant difference between them.
Measuring Brand Awareness — Location
Now, let’s look at the location for this age group. Respondents that resided in the city indicated 12% aided brand awareness whilst rural residents ranked at 11%. Again, not really a significant difference between the 18–45-year-old age group’s location demographic data.
We continued to look at the respondents’ employment status and education levels but again, none of these made a significant difference. Therefore, it is safe to say that the best audience for Milk brand managers to tap into is high-income females aged 18–45 who are living in the city.
Glossier
Let’s take a look at the Glossier makeup brand. Founded on the back of popular beauty blog Into the Gloss, American company Glossier has evolved to be one of the most “disruptive brands in beauty”. Big words! But what exactly are they disrupting? Surely a (supposedly) unpaid endorsement by Kim Kardashian got the brand in front of millions — but what does the data say?
For the Glossier brand, measuring brand awareness for the general population placed them at 13%, and at 62% for brand consideration.
Measuring Brand Awareness — Age
Looking at different age groups, the 18–45-year-olds had aided brand awareness levels 23% whilst in the 46–65-year-old category, it was slightly less at 20%.
Measuring Brand Awareness — Other Factors
Keeping with the younger age bracket, let’s look further into this demographic. For both high and low income levels, aided brand awareness was no different, with both income levels for the 18–45-year-olds ranking at 23%. Therefore, brand awareness for Glossier is at its highest for females aged 18–45, a more general audience than Milk.
The Ordinary
Canadian beauty brand the Ordinary called themselves ‘The Abnormal Beauty Company’. With its radical ingredient transparency, attractive packaging and affordable pricing, The Ordinary has become a bestseller. But just how well known is it amongst British women?
In the general population, The Ordinary ranks at 8% for aided brand awareness however it ranks 68% for brand consideration.
Measuring Brand Awareness — Age
Amongst the younger age group (18–45), aided brand awareness is at 12%, decreasing only slightly for the older age group (46–65) at 11%.
Measuring Brand Awareness — Income
Breaking it down further within the 18–45 female demographic, high-income earners ranked the Ordinary at 12% for aided brand awareness, with low-income earners ranked the brand at 11%.
Measuring Brand Awareness — Employment
Drilling down even further into the data, let’s see if full-time employment makes a difference — it does at 18%. This is the first time we have seen a jump of more than 1% across all three brands.
Measuring Brand Awareness for New Make-up Brands in the UK — The Conclusion
Out of the three makeup brands, it is good news for The Ordinary amongst British women! But why do women seem to love the brand so much? We suspect they are a fan of their clean branding, great prices and product transparency. Such features will often help raise brand awareness via word-of-mouth.
The Glossier is owning the content marketing space with traffic from their cult-beauty website Into The Gloss, which publishes thoughtful long-form content and educational interviews with influential celebrities.
And Milk has several USPs (vegan, cruelty, paraben-free, NYC). They could easily take on bigger make-up brands if they could hone their strategy accordingly.
We can also see that across these three relatively new brands they all had more or less the same audience with similar brand awareness across the board, with only a small jump of 6%. Perhaps what these brands need is to drill deeper into a niche audience. This is easy to do with a brand tracking tool like Latana which would allow brands to add more customised audience characteristics such as ‘cruelty-free products’ or ‘women with children’.
What Brand Managers Should Know
The main takeaway for brand managers is that their audience is not very distinct from the other new kids on the block. This indicates a competitive market. What action can they take going forward? More influencer marketing? How will they retain customers moving forward? Working on brand strategy is critical to make waves in a noisy consumer space. Using brand tracking data to define the brand’s niche audience will help brand managers to tailor their strategy accordingly.
Also, how can new makeup brands such as Milk, Glossier and The Ordinary continue to build their niche audiences? Measuring brand awareness and brand consideration gives makeup brand managers some important insights into how these brands are performing.
Whilst there were minimal differences in aided brand awareness between income streams, we were, for example, able to see a significant jump of 18% for British women aged between 18–45 who were in work full time.
Understanding these key differences between brand awareness and brand consideration and using a brand tracker to measure this data, means makeup brand managers will be in the best possible position to use the more precise demographic data and then can tailor their brand strategy accordingly. More than ever, brand managers must understand their audience, and in turn, they will give them the next cult beauty brand.
Originally published at https://www.latana.com.
