How Do We Buy Beauty Products? The Power of User-Generated Content
Amazon Prime Day was this past week and if you’re like us you snagged a few good beauty deals worth boasting about to your friends or family. Some of the best-selling brands from the event in the U.S. included Laneige (think, their infamous Lip Sleeping Mask) and NuFace. It comes as no surprise though; articles about Prime Day this year were dime a dozen from what seemed like every beauty outlet on the internet (e.g., Allure, The Cut, Vogue, etc.) – each with their own curated list of products to buy. We don’t know about you but it made us think about how much the beauty buying experience has evolved and how we ultimately buy products today.
There’s been a formidable powershift in terms of who we look to for inspiration or to help us make better purchase decisions. Consumer voice or the opinion of ‘everyday influencers’ now reigns supreme. They are the new gatekeepers of authority while traditional media outlets, celebrities, or retailers no longer hold the same power of influence. We largely have social media to thank for this paradigm shift – and the pandemic. We’re online a lot more and peer-to-peer reviews/insights makes us less skeptical and converts us into buyers. Curious to learn more? Read on.
It boils down to user generated content
Think about the last time you bought a beauty product (maybe it was Prime Day). If you were on the fence about it, what did you rely on to help you make your decision? In the age of #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt, it’s highly likely that you scoured social media to see what “skinfluencers” had to say about it or sifted through numerous product reviews on the website of a brand or retailer.
User generated content (UGC), a.k.a online product reviews/ratings or video content in the form of Instagram reels or TikTok videos, to name a few, is rising in importance and relevance – both for consumers and beauty brands. UGC is created by people, not brands, and in the context of beauty it provides cues about a product's quality, experience, and performance, or even the ethos of a brand. This type of content is perceived to be more genuine or authentic than content presented by brands or retailers themselves. But there’s a caveat: it can be difficult for consumers to identify true product evaluations versus biased/ paid reviews or those that may not be evidence-based.
Beauty products, especially skincare products, are “experience products” that are highly subjective in nature. It’s difficult to objectively assess them from a consumer point of view, even in terms of performance. Aside from people’s varying preferences in terms of a product’s texture, smell, feel on skin, etc., no two skin types or skin conditions are exactly the same. Two people with dark spots on their faces using the same brightening serum may experience different results. This is one of the reasons why UGC can be so important in the consumer's path to purchase.
A recent research study involving 9000+ consumers from the US and across the world showed that 86% of consumers sought out UGC for products they had never tried before and 68% looked at UGC for tips on products they have used before. If we look at online product reviews, in particular, a remarkable 99% of all shoppers read reviews always or sometimes when shopping online for beauty products, with 54% saying they always read reviews according to a consumer survey. But what about in store shoppers? Reviews matter to them, too; 85% say they read reviews at least sometimes when shopping for beauty products in a brick and mortar store.
Conclusion
So what’s the main takeaway here? As consumers, especially beauty consumers, we try to use information about other people’s experiences to make better choices. UGC offers social cues that help us understand the world around us; it’s now a crucial part of the buying decision process. The pandemic also heightened this behavioral shift – we became reliant on our peers for information and our trust mainly lies with them. Retailers also have an incentive to rethink how reviews are presented and guide consumers towards products they are likely to be more satisfied with.
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