Beauty Brands: 3 Recommendations to Better Utilize Social Media

The rise of social media has given way to an entirely new type of beauty entrepreneur: the social media savvy influencer. As a brand placed in this changing marketspace, it can be overwhelming and confusing to figure out how to stand out and be authentic on social. As a journalism and marketing student specializing in beauty content, I’ve identified two articles about the beauty industry and social media that will help build your online brand.

The first article, The Biggest Trends In The Beauty Industry, comes from Forbes of all places. Contributor Richard Kestenbaum identifies the various circumstances that have made the beauty industry so very lucrative in recent years. Indeed, he finds that half of the growth in beauty is actually done online. Kestenbaum explains that three circumstances holding up the beauty industry are as follows: consumers are on a journey of exploration, meaning that they enjoy trying new products and finding new brands; young, smaller brands continue to support a surge in creativity and bring their own ideas about what it means to be beautiful to the market place; and, creativity continues to surge because major beauty companies are constantly acquiring smaller companies at incredibly high values. Kestenbaum continues, outlining four major trends that young, fast-growing companies are taking advantage of on social. The first is products that result in immediate improvement or an instant fix; the second is using heavy makeup or surgery (or perhaps Photoshop) to create a porcelain, perfectly smooth looking canvas; the third is natural skincare; and the final is customization and personalization. Ultimately, brands that utilize these trends are continuing to dominate the online market.

Photo by Drunk Elephant

In her article for Allure, More Than Just Hashtags: How Social Media Is Changing the Beauty Industry, contributor Siraad Dirshe reports on the social media savvy and their ability to infiltrate the beauty industry. Most importantly, she recognizes their call for more diversity and inclusion in the industry. She outlines how hashtags, like #BlackGirlMagic, are creating communities of once marginalized voices in the beauty community. Not only has social media helped quantify the number of women who want products made specifically with them in mind, but it has also become a place where beauty brands can see what their costumers want and how they are feeling about the current climate of the beauty industry. Used correctly, social media proves to be a powerful tool for beauty companies.

                 

Based on these articles and my own knowledge of both marketing and the beauty industry, I’ve created a list of three action items that beauty companies should use when creating social media marketing campaigns.

·             Work with Influencers: Interacting with the social media savvy influencers, whether it be through comments, sponsorships, or collaborations, brings your brand to a whole new set of fans.

·             Create Authentic, Engaging Marketing: When creating marketing campaigns, think about the ways in which the product can connect to the audience and create a narrative around it in which customers can get involved—no one wants to be talked at.

·             Do Your Research: Follow emerging hashtags and accounts in the beauty industry; they are more attuned to the wants and needs of the consumers than you might think.

The beauty industry must continue to leverage social media in order to succeed.

Danielle Cohen is an undergraduate student at Northwestern University majoring in journalism, minoring in theatre studies, and pursuing a certificate in integrated marketing communications. She specializes in lifestyle, beauty, and fashion journalism. You can connect with her on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Digital Marketers, 3 Tips to Machine Learning Success

As digital marketers, you see Machine Learning technologies being used by all types of companies and in various ways. As a graduate student at Northwestern University, I have found 2 articles that provide important insights into these new technologies and how they are developed and used by digital marketers today. 

1. “Machine Learning is About to Turn the Marketing World Upside Down”

link:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/advertising-week/machine-learning-is-about_b_12649810.html

Authors and LinkedIn address:

Steven Wong: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenwong2

Derek Slater: https://www.linkedin.com/in/derekcslater

In this article, Steven Wong and Dereck Slater talked about how machine learning can revolutionize the way we think about digital marketing. For example, they discussed machine learning algorithms such as K-Means and Clustering Analysis, as well as how marketers today are using them to do market segmentation. In addition, they also talked about methods such as K-Nearest Neighbors and its importance in building a recommendation system on online retailers like Amazon. In all, this article would be a great starting point for you to learn the idea and application of Machine Learning.

Link to the image

2. “Google's Journey into Machine Learning: What Marketers Need to Know”

link: https://www.emarketer.com/Article/Googles-Journey-Machine-Learning-What-Marketers-Need-Know/1013999

Author and LinkedIn Address:

Justin Cutroni https://www.linkedin.com/in/justincutroni

Analytics Evangelist at Google

As the largest online advertising platform on planet Earth, Google has always been the leader in integrating machine learning methods into their advertisement platform. In this article, Justin Cutroni, an Analytics Evangelist from Google, talked about Google's view of machine learning and its potential impact on digital marketing. Regarding the future of machine learning, he commented, "It's big data, it's customer analytics, it's visual analytics". This article gives us a holistic view of how machine learning applications can change the way company interacts with their customers. 

After reviewing these two articles and from my work at Northwestern where I specialize in Data Analytics, I have 3 action items to consider as you explore machine learning systems and their relationship with marketing:

•       Automation Means Opportunities - Machine Learning applications give digital marketers a variety of tools to explore, monitor and understand their customers, and digital marketers could utilize the tools to find great opportunities in their companies.
•       Revolution Is HERE NOW - Equipped with the power of predictive analytics, Machine Learning applications would help digital marketers better understand customers’ purchasing pattern and transfer those insights into actions.
•       Machine Learning = Profits - Digital and online marketing focuses mainly on improving a campaign’s conversion rate, and Machine Learning helps marketers achieve this goal.

The Era of Machine Learning has come, and digital marketers still have time to catch up with the trend and utilize machine learning applications to improve your marketing effectiveness.

About the Author
Runzhe Cen
I am currently a graduate student at Northwestern University, pursuing a degree at the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing, with a specialization in the Data Analytics track. I will graduate in December 2017, and my intended career fields are data analytics, digital marketing and consulting. 
www.medill.northwestern.edu
You can contact me through Twitter at  @Runzhe_Cen or through LinkedIn at Runzhe Cen

Digital Marketers: Well Established Contents Arouse Brand Love Through Programmatic Bidding - EDITED

As digital marketers, expand the awareness of their brand is always on top of their mind. In digital marketing, this also means putting the content in the right time in the right place for the right people. Well established contents combine with programmatic bidding can arouse brand love among target consumers in the future.

"Programmatic in 2015: 3 Resolutions for Brands", written by Bod Arnold and published on January 2015. In this article, Bod talked about brand measurement nowadays can be done from awareness to strength. To leverage the quality of inventory, there are also ways such as using private market place and programmatic direct buyers to avoid the inventory quality issues. The article also emphasized the importance of mobile media. In summary, programmatic bidding helps digital marketers to establish a deeper brand connection by helping them to get the right ad to the right consumers on any screen through any channel.


source: http://lighthouse8.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Real-time-bidding.png




Caleb Govsalves' article "Man vs. Machine: From Programmatic to Empowerment in Digital Marketing," which is written on March 2015 is about the 2015 iMedia Summit. In this article, Caleb commented on this year's iMedia Summit and the hot topic "Who will win a fight of man versus machine." Caleb states that there is not even necessary a fight between men and machine on digital advertising. Marketing is shifting to consumer empowerment, and programmatic bidding should give the exact content out to attract consumers emotionally and empower consumers to build a brand love.

After reading these two articles and from my graduate studies in the Northwestern Medill IMC program, I have three recommendations for digital marketers:

• Updating Program - Continuously purify the program in automatically bidding, and embrace the most up-to-date techniques to target the right group of people using valid data.

• Emphasis Consumer Insight - Combine consumer insight into content building, and try to build brand love by touching consumer's heart.

• Mobile Worth Efforts - Mobile platform is important as time goes on. In the future mobile platform could be more popular than other platforms, so build the right bidding strategy and content for mobile to reach consumers in a digital era.

All in all, with digital bidding technologies advancing at a high speed, together with a well established brand content to accurately target consumers, it is proper to expect programmatic bidding to create business miracles.

Grace Song is a graduate student in the Integrated Marketing and Communication program and will graduate in December 2015. Grace has a passion in digital/interactive marketing including social media and SEO&SEM, and is seeking for an opportunity to work in digital/interactive and social media marketing for her career.
Grace can be reached at Tweeter @gracesung1011.

Marketing Researchers On a Budget: Be a Problem Solver to Convey the Value of Research to Your Clients

Frame up research recommendations within the context of your client's business and needs, and you’ll be providing significant value to the relationship. As part of my coursework at Northwestern's Medill IMC I spend a lot of time trying to better understand the role research and strategic planning play in the integrated marketing communications process, and I've outlined some of my thinking below.

If your clients aren’t investing in marketing research, then you have an opportunity to shine. Begin by identifying the actual pain points obstacles your client is experiencing. If you're struggling with this, here's some advice. Put yourself in your client's shoes, and imagine what keeps them up at night. There's your problem. Now spend some time developing a strategy using research designed to either overcome that obstacle or to provide the business intelligence and insights needed to do so. This recent article from USA Today is a good place to start for some ideas, as it provides several real-world examples of smart companies using established or emerging marketing research to drive valuable results. Learn more about the author, Scott Martin here.

You may be thinking that your clients don't have a dedicated research budget and you struggle with the idea of trying to show them the value in allocating resources. You're not alone. Every company in the world deals with finite resources, big and small. Yes, research can be very expensive, but there are some surprising affordable approaches you can take to offer smart marketing research strategies that won't break the bank. Offer up a cost effective, smart research strategy that is grounded in strong fundamentals and many clients will thank you for respecting their budgets and working intelligently on their behalf. Here's a great introduction from Entrepreneur Magazine on the budget-sensitive strategies some smart businesses are using to stay ahead of the competition. It's written by the always-smart Susan Gunelius.

Rather than provide an exhaustive list of research best practices and checklists, consider the following steps to get started and planning.

1. Start with an actionable question with financial or other measurable implications.
2. Find the most efficient way to honestly answer the question while making sure you fully understand any cost trade-offs you are making.
3. In plain English, deliver your research recommendations along with what actionable and measurable questions you plan to address.

A great place to begin is to sit down with one of your clients who is not investing in marketing research and ask them what business worries are keeping them awake at night. Then build a smart, budget-sensitive research program to provide them with actionable recommendations at solving their problem. Do it well and not only will you earn some new business, but you'll likely earn quite a bit of customer loyalty as well.

Matt Marcus is a strategic marketing professional with significant experience across consumer and business segments. He specializes in strategic consulting, consumer/market research and planning. Matt is a pursuing a master’s degree in Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University’s Medill School. Connect with him on Twitter (@mattmarcus178) and LinkedIn.

Innovative Packaging: Can this be the most effective form of food marketing?

As a marketing executive for food items, you understand the importance of packaging and how it enhances the appeal of the product. As a senior in the Northwestern Medill IMC program, I have found two articles that show the importance of packaging when it comes to marketing food products found in grocery stores.

In Effective Food Packaging Design: The Aisle as a Runway, Stephanie Silver brings up various points that reiterate that packaging for food items is of utmost importance when it comes to what drives consumers to make a purchase in the grocery store. This article highlights the fact that most food items in a grocery store are low involvement and most consumers spend less than a few seconds when choosing a food product. Since the average consumer is making many low involvement decisions while in the store, packaging has come to be very important. Packaging can not only attract consumers’ attention, but also promote certain messages that can appeal to the emotional side of consumers. The way a product is packaged is an easy way for food marketers to tell the consumers about the product inside and attract them to buy the product. When there are various options at around the same price for each item in a grocery store, packaging can be the factor that makes the consumer choose your product.

http://nishitau.soup.io/tag/food

Ted Mininni builds an effective argument on the premise that 85% of human decisions are governed by the sub conscious in his article: Appeal to the subconscious through package design. So, it is not effective for food packaging to list feature and benefits, but rather package the product in a way that appeals to the consumer on an emotional and deeper level. This is not an easy feat to accomplish because each brand has a target consumer, but also wants to reach out to consumers who would normally not purchase their product. Food packaging decision makers need to do extensive research in order to get a glimpse into the consumers sub conscious and this can then be translated on to the packaging which is the most tangible representation of a brand.

From these two articles, here are some ways to effectively package food items in order to attract consumer and appeal to their sub conscious emotional side

1. Research – dig deeper into what appeals to consumers emotionally. Find out if consumers value the price, quality, taste, or something else about your product and then highlight that through packaging.

2. Promote Message – use packaging an easy means to show what your product and brand stands for. Packaging can be used to promote a brands values or a certain message that they are trying to relay to consumers. For example, if the brand is moving towards an environmentally friendly stance, they can use sustainable material to package their products.

3. Attract Attention – this may be the most important part of marketing through packaging. When there are many options in a grocery aisle for the same kind of product, your brand should distinguish itself from the others through packaging. By using unique and innovative colors, shapes, fonts, etc consumers will be more likely to quickly decide to make a low involvement purchase.

Without effective packaging, your product will fail on the shelf. Even in the midst of marketing through ads in magazines or TV commercials, the most important form of marketing a food item comes down to the grocery aisle and what will make that consumer pick your product off the shelf. Innovative packaging will communicate a lot about your product and brand without using excessive wording and will also attract the consumer to put your product in their shopping cart.

Devika Ghosh is a senior at Northwestern University. She is studying Economics and also pursuing the Integrated Marketing Certificate. Devika is hoping to explore opportunities in the CPG realm and has had internship experiences with food related companies such as FIJI Water and the Food Group. Contact Devika on Twitter @DevikaGhosh3 or through LinkedIn to continue this conversation.

Luxury Marketers: Big Data from the boutique? New technologies help best serve your customers

  

Digital is radically changing the consumption pattern of luxury goods consumption in every way. As a graduate student studying the Integrated Marketing Communications in Northwestern University, I’ve always been interested in learning the marketing trends within luxury and how the industry would leverage technology as well as digitalization to make the best outcome. For those luxury managers who are poised to offer top-tier services as their merchandise, here I found two inspiring articles that would help you make it happen.

According to a recent report from McKinsey (see "Digital luxury experience: Keeping up with changing customers" by Linda Dauriz), the future of digital luxury hasn’t been bright ever — online luxury sales are growing twice as fast as the overall market. The report demonstrates that, in 2013, digital interactions directly generated more than 13% of offline luxury sales and influenced another 28% of sales. Also it shows that more than 45% of luxury purchases are influenced by what shoppers find in the digital universe. From all these mind-blowing numbers we can obviously feel the power of digitalization in terms of boosting luxury sales in today’s world. But, what’s more noteworthy is that although pure online transactions are growing twice as fast as the sector as a whole, they represent only about 4% of the total luxury goods market. Shoppers use the digital platform more for search and comparing purposes rather than making purchase — especially for luxury consumers who are going for more expensive or custom products. However, engaging, easy-to-navigate mobile platforms would play an important role to drive store traffic to the physical boutiques, since shoppers are more likely to use smartphones for commuting info (shopping or dining). More than half of their searches of products are on mobile devices, and by the time they actually enter the store, they’ve already gathered detailed information about the products they’re about to purchase.

Another way that digitalization could help in in-store sales is through in-store facial recognition. The article “Big Data is Watching” by Sophie Doran has introduced the state-of-the-art method of tracking in-store consumer data by following wi-fi signals and by using surveillance softwares to profile customers. As the article elaborates, Nordstrom’s experiment used video surveillance and signals from shoppers’ cellphones and apps to learn information as varied as their sex, how many minutes they spend in various parts of the store and how long they look at merchandise before buying it. Moreover such detailed info would be stored permanently and activate globally through the facial recognition tools. All the data gathered from this “in-store monitoring”, combined with data gathered from digital platform, can provide marketers valuable information about customer preferences so as to guide them to change store layouts and offering more customized services, creating ever satisfying in-store customer experience throughout the world. However, the legal issue has been brought up with it, suspending the experiments in Nordstrom after months. Generally in customers’ minds, personal data is the price they pay online for the ability to quickly compare pricing and arrange convenient delivery. Whereas they feel that this “give to get” mechanism won’t apply when it comes to in-store data collection — When retailers try and collect similar data from consumers in a physical retail environment, they become unnerved, with the key criticism of in-store data collection being lack of consent.

In reading the above 2 articles, I would suggest 3 actions for luxury marketers regarding how to best leverage big data to stay at the cutting edge and generate higher revenue benefited from what you have:

  

    1. Perfect in-store experience & use digital as catalyst. Digital is serving more as the helper for customers to purchase wisely, but boutiques are still where they make purchases. Deeper engagement with customers digitally, however, can increase store traffic to generate higher revenue.

     2. See the value of in-store data. The value of In-store experience for customers determines the value of monitor in-store behaviors for marketers. Combine in-store data with online transaction, marketers can profile best-valued customers more accurately and offer them more satisfying purchase experience.

     3. Never overlook the legitimacy of data collection. The dispute over the legitimacy of gathering user data is more serious than ever. Complaints and criticism around “big data or big brother” have been and will still be the topic. Therefore, marketers have to notify customers before getting any access to data in order to keep away from troubles.

The luxury market is seen as the most passion-driven and customized market. The nature of the industry has already revealed its close relationship with advanced data analysis. As the new technology popularizes in application, the deeper than ever understanding of each customer would open a brand new page in terms of building customer-brand relationship, and thus create a much more efficient business model to generate a win-win situation for both brands and customers. Let’s look forward to it.

Cerise Miao is an MS candidate in Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University, majoring in marketing analytics and brand strategy. Majored in economics in college, she is interested in music, movies, languages and fine arts. She has passion for luxury and for data analysis. 
Follow Cerise @CeriseMiao