Online Exclusive: It’s Time to Get Emotional
Alisa Marie Beyer, founding partner and CEO of The Beauty Company, says when it comes to forging a real connection with your target consumer, go big or go home. It’s no longer enough to just be new or different, now—you have to be emotional.
By Alisa Marie Beyer

Many different factors influence a consumer’s decision to purchase one beauty product over another:

Alisa Marie Beyer

messaging, price, and packaging—but when it comes to understanding the force that drives these decisions, you have to go deeper: her emotions. Cutting-edge MRI technology has revealed that overwhelmingly, humans are emotion-based decision makers. And why not? It’s not logic alone that causes us to spend $4 or more dollars a day on our favorite designer coffee drink; it’s all of the emotions that buying these beverages elicit. In fact, neurobiologists have found that emotional reactions to brand related stimuli are processed 80% faster than cognitive reactions*, meaning that for every logical decision she makes, you can bet her initial first reaction started with an emotion.

Here at The Beauty Company, we are always looking to go deeper with beauty consumers, which is why for our 2012 PinkReport Let’s Get Emotional: Using ‘Emotional Science’ to Segment the US Beauty Consumer we decided it was high time we let ourselves get emotional and explore this pivotal, almost primitive connection women form with their beauty brands and products. Executed with a sophisticated segmentation system, we explored the relationship women have with beauty using a comprehensive survey tool designed to capture psychographic and demographic information that directly correlates to the beauty industry, the beauty consumer and most important—your brand.

The link that emotions forge between women and beauty is one most of us feel on a daily basis, even

The link that emotions forge between women and beauty is very common.

if we aren’t really sure what it is we are feeling! We all have our favorite shade of lip gloss which makes us feel instantly better about ourselves and the world (regardless of what’s going on), and we all remember distinctly the perfume we were wearing on our first date with our future husbands, boyfriends or partners. Beauty products bring beauty to our lives, to our handbags, to our bathroom vanities and on many levels, peace-of-mind to our souls. In this year’s PinkReport, our research revealed that rather than being highly divergent, the emotional links women have to beauty are remarkable similar. In all, we discovered five key categories in which beauty consumers tend to cluster: Beauty Importance, Beauty Knowledge, Beauty Attachment, Beauty Control and Beauty Anxiety, and we call these clusters the Emotional Beauty Spectrum.

Like peeling away the layers of an onion, once these categories were identified we were able to then delve deeply into understanding how this spectrum influences women’s interaction with the beauty category overall. Or more simply: why some women dig your brand, and some women don’t. As suggested by the name, Beauty Importance indicates how important she feels beauty is to her life (I can’t live without my entire Chanel skincare regimen vs. I sometimes use Oil of Olay, but mostly only for special occasions), whereas Beauty Attachment reveals that for some women, beauty products are functional items – like car keys – for which they don’t feel an emotional bond, yet for others, beauty products are like old friends, and the attachment to them is strong. Beauty Control probed women’s confidence level in beauty product effectiveness – can a retinol face serum really smooth away the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles, or is there nothing to be done when time starts its inevitable march across our face, while Beauty Knowledge revealed how confident consumers feel in their own understanding of beauty products – the selection, the process, the results, everything. The final spectrum, Beauty Anxiety, was an unexpected find.

This fifth spectrum revealed that for a certain beauty consumer, regardless of her confidence or knowledge of the beauty category, the choices available to her create a sense of anxiety, rather than excitement. For consumers who score high in this spectrum, beauty stores or aisles are fraught with difficulty and land mines, yet for women who have a low Beauty Anxiety score; these same outlets are a playground tailor made for them. Through a careful analysis of the unique data points that informed each of these spectrums, we were then able to identify the five primary beauty consumers in the US today, and chances are, you’ll want to know her because one or two of them (maybe even three!) are your consumer.

Archetypes at a glance
After statistically validating the significance of each spectrum, further analysis led us to the characteristics, outlook, shopping habits, preferences and motivations of the five key beauty consumers in the US today – The Diva, The All-American, The Classic, The Minimalist and The Bewildered. Not just one-dimensional snapshots, these profiles are living, breathing insights into how these consumers think not only about beauty – but your brand.

To get to this information, we probed demographic questions such as her age, her education level, her residence, as well as a core set of psychographical and emotional questions designed to unlock her deepest thoughts on her consumer habits overall – not just beauty. What makeup brand can she not live without? If she were a shoe, computer, handbag or grocery store – which would she be? Which brand of shoes does she prefer and what makeup items have to be in her handbag or bathroom vanity at all times? Which celebrity does she most admire and if she were a bumper sticker, what would be her slogan? By connecting to not only her top line preferences, but her deeper emotional connections to the brands she chooses and uses in her life, Let’s Get Emotional reveals the whitespace where logic falls short, passion takes over and true emotional bonds are formed.

TBC’s 2012 PinkReport: Let’s Get Emotional, Using Emotional Science to Segment the US Beauty Consumer reveals the emotional anchors which keep women in love with your brand and why in a completely new and innovative way. Don’t just wonder why she wears scarlet lipgloss to go for a run yet wouldn’t be caught dead with Chapstick in her handbag – know why, and learn to speak the emotional language that will let you celebrate, reinforce and maintain this connection with your key beauty consumer today, tomorrow and well into her beauty future.

*Digital Marketing.com, Speaking to the Consumers Heart, Not Head, 3/24/2010, accessed on 10/28/2011