Brands can harness ‘emotional science’ to market products to women, report claims
Market intelligence firm The Beauty Company (TBC) has compiled its 2012 ‘PinkReport: Let’s Get Emotional’ focusing on ‘emotional science’ and how this influences the way a woman will react to a cosmetic product.
The researchers have identified five beauty consumer archetypes that women fit into, and this can influence how they will shop for cosmetics.
“Using advanced analytics to identify key characteristics that define each archetype, [the] study peers beyond dry demographics and explores the conscious and unconscious chemistry women have with beauty, and reveals how this emotional segmentation can advance your beauty brand,” says the report.
Where do you fit in?
The five beauty consumer archetypes identified, are: The Diva; The All-American; The Classic; The Minimalist; and The Bewildered; each of which affects the role beauty plays in a consumer’s life according to TBC.
“Extensive research showed that no matter the beauty related topic, there are several distinct spectrums within which beauty buyers tend to differ, and these five spectrums are an intricate part of how women connect with beauty and how and why they form (or don’t form) attachments to their beauty brands,” said TBC.
Basically, according to the report, where women fall within these spectrums dictates how they interact in the beauty category overall; a term which TBC has coined ‘the Emotional Beauty Spectrums’.
These spectrums are influence by the importance of beauty in the consumer’s life, their assessment of their beauty smarts, their emotional attachment to beauty, their faith in the efficacy of beauty products and their response to the volume of beauty products there are available.
Purchases based on emotion
This report follows a study released earlier this year in Europe that found that people who use cosmetics do so primarily for emotional reasons.
Researchers from the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) carried out personal surveys on 355 women aged between 18 and 50, who were selected in a random sample, asking them to evaluate various aspects of their perceptions of the functional and emotional factors of the cosmetics they used, as well as their degree of satisfaction with them.
The results showed that "consumer satisfaction is greatest when the cosmetics brand helps to strengthen positive emotions through the perception of 'caring for oneself' and removing feelings of worry and guilt about not taking care of one's appearance", said Vanessa Apaolaza, lead author of the study.
However, this raises concerns as it suggests that in order for the brand to provide this positive emotional experience, it must first cause consumers to have negative feelings about themselves, such as concern about and dissatisfaction with their appearance.
