Fast forward 20 years and nothing much has changed on the quantitative research front. GfK, a large and well respected market research agency, came onto the scene in 2008 with a measurement of fine fragrance that relied on retailer cooperation in sharing their retail sales data. However, not all the key retailers were prepared to participate and GfK pulled out of researching the category earlier this year.
Despite the lack of accurate hard data, there are many other ways of gaining insight into consumer behaviour and purchasing, much of it made possible through the enormous growth in digital media. Think about this: there are currently some 95,000 beauty bloggers whose main audience is women aged 35-49, the core demographic for many beauty brands. The bloggers not only provide a daily feed of information on what is happening in terms of new product launches, but also encourage feedback in the form of online comments from their followers.
Twitter is another new avenue for consumer understanding, heavily used by people who send tweets in real time on everything and anything that is happening in their lives or that they have an opinion about.
As a result, consumer research has been completely turned on its head. Shaun Ingleton, managing director of digital agency Skive, believes that beauty brands are only just beginning to see the value in social media as a means to understanding their customers. “The companies doing it best are engaging in a two-way dialogue and using it to create relationships. It’s a completely new way of doing things. Brands need to follow the consumer in social spaces and join in the conversation.” He sees social media as consumer research that requires a completely new mindset. So instead of shouting at people “buy this!” brands need to understand its conversational potential.
If only it were that easy. Ingleton is finding that the beauty clients he is working with are “terrified and overwhelmed” by social media so do nothing about it. He recently set up a series of meetings to get PRs to engage proactively with bloggers and those using Twitter. “I’m waiting for the industry to wake up,” he says, but he’s confident that in six months mindsets will have changed.
Over the past year, fragrance supplier Givaudan has been using fragrance blogs to research hypotheses it might have on trends and to identify future scenarios.
This is achieved through BlogTrek, a new addition to its relaunched MIRIAD intranet programme that gives employees access to in-depth information on the fragrance category. “Innovation is driven by people who are passionate about a subject and we find the fragrance bloggers can help us identify new and emerging trends,” explains Givaudan marketing director Maurizio Volpi.
Givaudan carefully screens the fragrance blogs and chooses those known to provide accurate insights. An example is where Givaudan will look at words frequently used by the bloggers when expressing positive and negative comments. It recently found the most negative word was ‘sweet’, used to describe a scent as being overpowering. “We see a lot of launches in this direction,” observes Volpi. ‘Green’ comes out as one of the most positive words used by bloggers when describing fragrances they like and Volpi says this reflects the growth of this family within perfumery creation. Another positive word was ‘oudh’, an ingredient increasingly used in niche perfumery; the bloggers tend to write about more niche than mainstream brands. “These findings create for us the opportunity to work in a more forward looking direction,” he affirms.
According to Google, over 70% of the population is online, researching interests, sharing opinions, consuming content and purchasing product, making the internet an invaluable source of real time consumer data. In order to help companies make sense of this increasing volume of online information it has launched Google Insights for Search, a set of digital tools that work with data across the internet.
The challenge facing marketers will be making sense of this database to gain insights into consumer behaviour so that they can develop more effective campaigns.
Consumer understanding is all about using a variety of tools and keeping an open mind to new developments.It’s easy to keep doing things because that is how you’ve always done it in the past, but today’s “brave new world” of digital media holds the key to understanding the consumer in ways people would never previously have thought possible.
Do you remember what life was like before the internet? No, neither do I. Shaun Ingleton left me with this thought: “Before too long, we won’t even remember what life was like before Twitter.” Time to embrace the new.
