What Are Beauty Buyers Looking For In Brands Today?
Image: Prismatics
Today’s beauty and wellness buyers have endless choice in launching emerging brands in their stores as a sea of indie brands have come to market over the last few years.
We’ve put together a list of key building blocks you’ll want to remember as you continue to shape and refine your own brand story. These will help you better prepare for what it takes to thrive in today’s highly-competitive market.
Defining Your USP (Unique Selling Proposition)
Brands must clearly establish their USPs in the early development years. They must know their “WHY” for existing and create a message that their customers can easily understand as to what makes their brand irresistibly unique to its competition.
Front-Facing Founders
Buyers love to build with involved brand founders that remain likable authorities in the brands and categories they are building. It can be additionally beneficial when founders carry a significant social media following to help curate authentic content and meaningful conversations with their growing customer base.
Supporting Diversity & Inclusivity
It’s important for brands to respect, celebrate and incorporate diverse thought and inclusive storytelling as they build their company. We live in a day where brands need to welcome customers of all size, age, race, religion, sexual identity and differing abilities. This should repeatedly influence how brands internally hire for their teams, but can also effect how they market and message their brand to a larger audience.
Crafting Your Social Strategy
Content rules everything today. It’s crucial to have a strong IG or TikTok strategy in place to be successful in attracting new retail partners. Buyers expect brands to help do the heavy-lifting in building brand exposure and creating an authentic and loyal brand community that can be leveraged to cross-promote their stores.
Elevating Social Impact
Giving back matters, especially when marketing to GenZ and future generations to come. Consumers want to support authentic brands that are contributing back to society in a positive way. This could imply giving a portion of sales back to a charitable cause that naturally aligns with a brand’s overarching ethos.
Prioritising Sustainability
It’s crucial for brands to be environmentally responsible in how their products are made. Brands should think about how to incorporate more eco-friendly packaging and manufacturing practices. They should also finds ways to further eliminate their use of toxic materials and explore paths that help them reduce their carbon footprint in the process.
Offering Clean & Kind Formulations
Although “clean beauty” is ambiguously defined across most markets, it remains important to build a brand that strives toward clean formulas and responsible production. For example, brands would want to build toward Credo Beauty’s definition of “clean beauty” as it’s one of the more strict definitions in the US market. Brands should also try to source fairly and use more efficacious ingredients so they can work to acquire additional seals like Gluten-Free, Fair Trade, Vegan, Cruelty-Free, etc. — all which help customers feel more confident in choosing between products for purchase.
Building Award-Winning Concepts
Brands should also seek to credential their work by building innovative products with high-performance results, sustainable packaging and remarkable storytelling that could help them place (and potentially win) a host of beauty awards given across the editorial world each year. This continues to help solidify buyer confidence in the brands they trust and use.
Reach out to hello@constellarconsultancy.com if you need additional help to strategically build and shape your brand for commercial success.