Putting beauty at the top of the social shopping list
CosmeticsDesign-Europe.com caught up with Amy Kean, head of consumer innovation at MPG Media Contacts ahead of a presentation she will be giving at this year’s in-cosmetics, to be held in Barcelona, April 17 – 19.
Kean will be speaking as part of the free series of marketing trends presentations at the event, and will give a presentation entitled ‘How to Make Social Shopping Truly Beautiful’, as part of a series of three marketing trend presentations.
The very first thing to do with tackling this area is to tap into the fact that social media is reliant on the very concept of social interaction and that the very basis for all of this is the audience.
Making online shopping 'more social'
“Firstly, social commerce doesn’t just mean being able to buy via a Facebook page, or having Twitter-only deals, it should be about making online shopping more social in general, whether that involves recommendations from friends on social networks, allowing people to ‘like’ products on your e-commerce site, or even facilitating group-buying," Kean said.
She also explained about the type of cosmetics companies that are most suited to marketing their products on social media, and particularly focused on colour cosmetics, emphasizing the fact that these ranges are often changed and updated to keep up with new trends.
“There are some cosmetics brands whose season’s colours are the ones we look forward to hearing about – Chanel’s hottest lip and nail shades, for example, tend to be the ones each season that many other cosmetics brands will replicate,” she said.
“As such, the launch of its latest lines are considered an ‘event’ with the industry.”
Chanel gets facebook shopping right
Kean went on to explain about Chanel’s exclusive launch of a new lip shade specifically on Facebook, and how this generated a great deal of attention that was translated into shared information on different facebook users’ profiles about the product launch.
But for all the companies out there that are getting social media strategies right, there are a great deal of examples of how to get it wrong. And often it is very wrong.
“Retailers will spend a significant amount of time and investment in building a fully functional, highly usable ecommerce platform, but we’ve seen a good few examples of where they haven’t applied the same stringency to their social commerce offering,” Kean said.
“Many brands who have simply launched transactional tabs on their Facebook pages haven’t kept the user front of mind, providing a clunky commerce experience that’s nothing like that on their own site.”
Getting into the mindset of facebook users
When tackling social media, Kean explains that companies have to get into the mindset of the user, and that means giving them enhanced functionality, immediacy, privacy and appropriate user-testing.
Finally, on the best approach to building in future expansion plans for a social media platform, Kean believes that the focus should be to concentrate on the ecommerce platform and incorporate social functionality into that.
“Using tools such as Facebook Connect and the Twitter API means that you can quite easily turn transactions on your site from a solo process into a social process,” she said.
“Launching a new tab on a Facebook page in tandem with a new product can be great to inform your fans and generate PR, but it’s important to make sure your social commerce offering has longevity, and is linked with your wider commerce activity.”
Amy Kean will be giving her presentation on social media on Thursday 19 April at 13:30, in the Marketing Trends Theatre, during the in-cosmetics 2012 event, in Barcelona.
