Internet Increasingly Important for Beauty Sales
Insight by Leah
Although beauty product sales are declining overall, a bright spot of news appeared – Internet sales are up. Over the coming months, it will be interesting to see if retailers and brands shift their focus and campaigns to the Internet as it represents a viable and cost effective sales channel. As well, it appears that consumers are increasingly using the Internet for research and review purposes, increasing the importance of beauty bloggers, Twitter and other forms of social media. The Nhuch will continue to explore this growing sales channel and its influence.
BeautyPackaging.com article excerpt:
The state of the economy appears to be taking its toll on beauty purchases across most retail channels, with the exception of one – the Internet. According to "Emerging Channels Series: Beauty Care Products, Special Focus: The Internet" from The NPD Group, Inc., the Internet gained one percentage point and was the only retail channel to experience an increase in the number of women who reported mentions for beauty products . The Internet, an increasingly dynamic, though comparatively small channel for beauty, has a higher ratio of women saying they spent more, relative to those who said they spent less on beauty in the past year. The average annual beauty spending per woman is $86 for this channel. The ease of shopping online and product availability continues to be what is driving Internet shoppers who spend more via this channel than in the prior year. Read complete article
One Comment
Viewed in the context of big beauty brands, it seems reasonable that they would focus on brand building. However, the social web enables a new type of experience much more like the traditional retail counter model – a real person talking to another person about what they need and what products might work for them. We already know this works, it just got easier to do with more people.
Once brands realize that the social web just extends what they already know about how people learn about their products, I would be really surprised if they never turned back to the industrial approaches they have become so used to.