Beauty rituals such as skincare and make-up date back to ancient times — over 7000 years ago, to be precise — and enjoyed by almost every culture in the world.
Then came the rise of the Hollywood starlet which saw entrepreneurs Elizabeth Arden and Max Factor bring skincare and makeup brands to the mass market.
Today, skincare and makeup brands and products are enjoyed by women on a multitude of levels: they inspire confidence, they are the base for hundreds of new and creative looks, they allow for reinvention, and they facilitate wellbeing and self-care.
Measuring brand awareness is important to see which make-up brands continue to reach the mass market.
Measuring Brand Awareness for Make-up Brands in the UK
As beauty brand managers, you’re aware that women are the biggest global consumers of both skincare and makeup products. It’s your job to make sure they choose your brand — but the challenge is how to make your brand stand out in an incredibly noisy, multi-billion dollar industry.
So, how is it done?
By using brand tracking software to obtain data-driven insights about consumers that allow you to market directly to your target audiences. More specifically, by measuring brand awareness for your brand.
Let’s jump in and see how brand-aware British women are and see if these relatively new makeup brands are making waves in an already saturated beauty market.
Measuring Brand Awareness: The Results
We recently asked 1000 respondents in the UK about three relatively new makeup brands, Milk, Glossier, and the Ordinary. The goal was to measure the brand awareness for each brand in order to find out with which niche audience each brand was at its highest.
Using brand tracking data, we were able to get a closer look at the types of women who’d purchase these brands, their brand awareness levels, and brand consideration levels — as well as age, level of income, and employment details.
Milk Makeup
Milk Makeup is a cruelty-free, vegan makeup brand hailing from New York City. Measuring brand awareness within the general British female population, Milk’s showed 7%. Of the 7% that were aware of the brand, 50% reported brand consideration.
Measuring Brand Awareness: Age
Within our results, we found a difference in brand awareness between various age groups, starting with 11% for the 18 to 45-year-olds and dropping to 9% for the 46 to 65-year-olds.
Perhaps Milk could run a marketing campaign tailored towards their older demographic? With so little difference in brand awareness, it may be worth a try.
Measuring Brand Awareness: Income
Using data on respondents' incomes, we can dig a little deeper into our audience.
Looking at the younger age group, those with higher reported income levels report 12% when measuring brand awareness. Alternatively, those with a lower income bracket report 11% — showing a fairly insignificant difference between them.
Measuring Brand Awareness: Location
Now, let’s take a look at the location for the younger age group.
Respondents who reside in a city indicated 12% brand awareness, whilst rural respondents reported 11%. Again, we did not find a significant difference in brand awareness between the 18 to 45-year-old’s location demographic data.
We continued our analysis of our respondents' demographic data — employment status and education levels — but, once again, there were no significant differences to be found.
Therefore, it's safe to say that the best audience for Milk brand managers to focus on going forward into is: high-income females aged 18-45 who live in a city.
Glossier
Next, let’s take a look at the D2C makeup brand, Glossier.
Founded on the back of popular beauty blog Into the Gloss, American company Glossier has evolved into one of the most “disruptive brands in beauty”. High praise! But what exactly are they disrupting?
A (supposedly) unpaid endorsement by Kim Kardashian got the brand in front of millions — but what does the data tell us?
For Glossier, we measured a brand awareness level of 13% for the general population. And of the 13% that are aware, 62% reported brand consideration.
Measuring Brand Awareness: Age
When looking at the different age groups surveyed, 18 to 45-year-olds reported brand awareness levels of 23%, whilst 46 to 65-year-olds reported slightly lower levels at 20%.
Measuring Brand Awareness: Other Factors
Remaining with the younger age bracket, let’s take a deeper look at this demographics' data.
For both high- and low-income levels, brand awareness shows no significant differences, with both income levels for 18 to 45-year-olds reporting 23%.
Therefore, brand awareness for Glossier is at its highest for females aged 18-45 — interestingly, a more general audience than Milk.
For a deep-dive into Glossier's 2020 brand performance, check out our Brand Bite.
The Ordinary
Canadian beauty brand The Ordinary calls itself "The Abnormal Beauty Company". With its radical ingredient transparency, attractive packaging, and affordable pricing, The Ordinary has become a bestseller.
But just how well-known is it amongst British women?
In the general population, The Ordinary has brand awareness levels of 8% for brand awareness. However, of the 8% that are aware, it boasts brand consideration of 68%. Impressive!
Measuring Brand Awareness: Age
Amongst the younger age group (18 to 45-year-olds), brand awareness came in at 12% — decreasing only slightly for the older age group (46 to 65-year-olds) to 11%.
Measuring Brand Awareness: Income
Breaking it down further within the 18 to 45-year-old female demographic, those who reported higher incomes ranked The Ordinary at 12% for brand awareness. Those who reported lower incomes ranked the brand at 11%.
Measuring Brand Awareness: Employment
Drilling down even further into the data, we were interested to see if full-time employment made a difference.
Spoiler alert, it does! At 18%, full-time employed women aged 18-45 with high incomes are the most aware. This is the first time we've seen a jump of more than 1% across all three brands.
Conclusion
Of the three makeup brands we researched, The Ordinary showed the best results. This is good news for their future success with British women!
But why do women seem to love the brand so much? We suspect they're a fan of the company's sleek branding, reasonable prices, and product transparency. Such features will often help raise brand awareness via word-of-mouth.
We conducted an updated, mini deep dive into this brand recently and found that the following:
As you can see, The Ordinary seems to be growing and continuing its streak of success.
When it comes to Glossier, it's owning the content marketing space with traffic from their cult-beauty website Into The Gloss, which publishes thoughtful long-form content and educational interviews with influential celebrities.
Finally, Milk has several impressive USPs — such as being vegan, cruelty-free, paraben-free, and headquartered in NYC. If they can hone their strategy accordingly, Milk should be able to easily take on more established make-up brands.
We also found that across these three relatively new brands, they all have (more or less) the same audience. When it comes to brand awareness, it's similar across the board — with only a small jump of 6%.
Perhaps these brands need to double down and identify more niche audiences. With a brand tracking tool like Latana, this is easy and would allow brands to look into more customized audience characteristics, such as "cruelty-free products" or "women with children".
Final Thoughts: What Brand Managers Should Know
The main takeaway here? The three brand's audiences are not very distinct, which indicates a highly competitive market.
What action can they take going forward? Perhaps more influencer marketing? How will they retain customers? By working on developing a brand strategy — which is critical to make waves in a noisy consumer space.
Additionally, using brand monitoring to define their niche audiences will help brand managers tailor their strategies accordingly.
Whilst we found minimal differences in brand awareness between income brackets for The Ordinary, we did identify a significant jump to 18% awareness for full-time employed British women between the ages of 18-45.
By understanding the key differences between brand awareness and brand consideration and using a brand tracker, brand managers will put themselves in the best possible position going forward. Additionally, by utilizing more precise demographic data and tailoring their brand strategy accordingly, they'll set themselves up for success.
Now more than ever, brand managers need to understand their audience if they want to be able to deliver the next cult beauty brand.
For more insights into a major beauty brand, check out our article on Fenty Beauty.
