With a crowded beauty market, understanding the consumer is more important than ever.
In a conversation presented by Beauty Barrage, Kathryn Hopkins, senior editor of beauty at WWD, sat down with Sonia Summers, founder and chief executive officer of Beauty Barrage and Jacob St. John, founder and chief executive officer of Navigo, to give insights into today’s consumer behavior — straight from the shelves of major beauty retailers and their online channels.
With more than 300 beauty experts across the U.S. and Canada, Beauty Barrage is a retail agency for beauty brands with in-store consultants; the company just recently launched in the U.K.
“What’s different about what we do is that we have a whole verified education,” Summers said at the summit. “I think it’s crazy to put people out into the field and expect them to be experts after just one day of training. We follow the marketing plan for retailers to make sure that we’re understanding what marketing is doing and that we are all in sync.”
Navigo is similar to Beauty Barrage, but is focused on the online element, by educating consumers on platforms such as Amazon, Ulta and Sephora. The company looks at how consumers are experiencing their brand online versus in-store.
“A customer might see you on TikTok or through a paid social,” said St. John. “You’re paying to get this content out in front of the customer but you’re not the one deciding anymore where they’re going to go purchase. They don’t care about your channel segmentation and how are you are measuring your customer acquisition costs for your DTC site.”
Understanding the fluidity for consumers moving across channels is key, St. John said. And not every consumer who shops at Ulta is the same as the shopper at Sephora.
“We collect data at every single shift that we do,” Summers said. “We collect shopper insights sale. We do real time analytics. We pivot where we have to. The people that go into Sephora are not the same people that go into Ulta, department stores or Bluemercury. You have to understand how to navigate in every situation.”
The key takeaway from shoppers in stores is that consumers are more educated than ever before. They’re looking for a consultation approach, Summers said. Beauty Barrage is looking at what the customer is seeking out to, in turn, help build brand loyalty.
Notably, an increasingly crowded marketplace is why shoppers need more support both online and in-store. When consumers go looking for a viral product, they might end up realizing through education that it’s not the product for them.
“For online, you don’t have someone standing there to help guide and educate the customers,” St. John said. “If you are a brand that is not investing there, all of the traffic that’s coming to your store — with viral moments that you may be able to capture — you’re still losing some of that momentum by not converting those consumers and not having that education to stand out.”
And on the tech side, AI has also been a massive space for beauty brands to see growth. While SEO, or search engine optimization, was a major driver, there’s now GEO, or the generative engine optimization. Recently, ChatGPT announced that it had partnered with Shopify to create its instant checkout feature.
Looking forward, Summers foresees that in-store, online and agentic commerce evolve together through continuing to educate consumers to make the best decision.
“Knowing that the consumer is going to be armed with more education is great because you don’t want to be taking that for granted. You’re not just educating them because they know anything. Most of the time, they know quite a lot. It’s really important to meet them there and guide them.”