How Beauty Is Leveraging Technology to Fuel Social Entertainment – WWD
TikTok ranked as a top website of 2021 as people everywhere turn to the app for everything from dance videos and hair tutorials to advice on mental health. Meta has also announced it will be prioritizing video as consumers continue to flock to it as a preferred source of entertainment.
With no signs of slowing down, Kate Kenner Archibald, chief marketing officer of Dash Hudson, said the result of this trend is a movement where the consumer base is now a convergence of commerce and entertainment on social media.
One company that has been quick to pick up on supplying its consumer base with entertaining content on social media is Forma Brands, including Morphe, which was a pioneering beauty brand for marketing on YouTube and has made social media a core part of its marketing strategy.
According to Alison Nadel, director of social media and brand marketing at Forma Brands, entertainment has always been part of the Morphe brand DNA. “Part of our growth really came from our famous friends and our founder having relationships throughout the beauty industry and relying on our beauty experts to get the word out about our products,” Nadel said. “In the 2010s, YouTube is where it all started for beauty. That’s where the tutorials were. That’s where megastars became megastars in beauty. We understood the power of that.”
The brand was able to harness the power of YouTube because its founder really understood, and still does, the power of storytelling and how those famous friends with personalities could enhance the brand’s personality. It’s knowing how entertaining a customer can bring a brand to life.
As other social platforms have grown, Nadel said, the strategy has always been to migrate into them.
“We have a really amazing community and audience on Instagram that was built in partnership with these famous friends and we take it on as our responsibility to entertain them and delight them,” Nadel said. “We show them the brand but not by talking at them but talking with them.”
Still, social media platforms are not one-size-fits-all for content and with the emergence of TikTok, brands are having to navigate capturing audience attention in a shorter time than ever.
Archibald described the shift Morphe made as going from content to entertainment. But what was the key to driving that shift? Nadel credits listening to the customer, the community the brand had built online.
Moreover, Archibald praised the company for taking advantage of leveraging technology to fuel its ecosystem and ultimately entertain consumers, because as Archibald and Nadel agreed, to fully understand what the consumer wants from each social platform it comes down to technology. To that end, Forma Brands uses Dash Hudson for decision-making data.
“We’re constantly looking at what worked last week, what worked last month, what worked last year, what worked last week, last year, to see what we should be doing to be diving into key learnings and iterating off of content that’s working,” Nadel said.
FOR MORE WWD BUSINESS NEWS:
Are Gen Z and Millennial Consumers Really That Different?
Dash Hudson Discusses Driving Sales Through Social Media
Market Intel Report Retail’s New Digital Ecosystem
Gloss