• by Aaron Smith , April 1, 2024

Today, the personal care industry stands at a crossroads, challenged not only by shifting market trends but also by evolving consumer expectations. As brands vie for attention in a crowded digital and physical marketplace, there are clear paths to a winning strategy. Here are four:

Define your center of gravity In a sea of choices, winning personal care brands carve out a clear place in the market. Some focus on a hero ingredient, like Cerave with ceramides or Aveeno with oat. Others focus on simplicity itself, like the Ordinary with its single-ingredient clinical formulas. One important point to consider is how to balance the tangible benefits of science with softer dimensions of beauty and care. For most brands, finding the right place to play on this spectrum is critical to defining which audiences you want to win with and the types of benefits and claims to focus on.

Prioritize easy navigation. Overloading consumers with information about every possible thing a product does only creates unnecessary complexity. This can be prevented through a smart naming and information hierarchy, which in this category are deeply intertwined. If product names are clear and descriptive, secondary information can be minimal. If product names are complex or evocative, secondary information that includes product type, usage, hero ingredients and claims will be necessary to help consumers shop (but even this information should be streamlined).

Design a cohesive brand experience. The worlds of D2C brands and traditional brands are converging on the shelves of Ulta and the pages of Amazon. Whether it’s a digital-native brand evolving its experience for retail shelves, or a traditional brand trying to define its presence on new digital channels, today’s personal care brands need to be able to do both in a really clear and cohesive way. This requires leaders to think about personal care brand expression holistically in a way that reflects the way their consumers shop. What is the role of the package in the experience? How can we cue different attributes of the brand across digital and physical touch points? How can photography and graphic language reinforce a brand’s positioning?

When considered holistically, brands can create a dynamic, flexible system that extends from the brand to the products and back again as consumers browse online, buy in-store and beyond. 

Build trust and credibility. Today’s consumers are increasingly aware and skeptical of how brands present themselves. Showing real and diverse audiences across gender, race, age, abilities and/or skin conditions is imperative for personal-care brands to establish a genuine connection with consumers. Authentic imagery that reflects a diverse range of consumer profiles while showing the product in genuine application will result in a better understanding of important product characteristics, usage, efficacy, and relevance to their daily self-care routines. Brands like Glossier have built a following by developing relationships with customers, expanding product portfolios to serve them, and then reflecting those relationships back into their brand worlds in an authentic and meaningful way.