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The Future of Collaborations

November 18th, 2012

Walking into a Sephora store is a true experience of brand overload. The products range from $8 Hello Kitty nail color to $300 Clarisonic gadgets. Long established brands like Dior sit next to new organic skin care lines like Boscia. As new collections roll out every month, Beauty Insiders rack up points and samples at the checkout line. In the midst of organized chaos, the beauty experts in black stride through the aisles, helping customers choose between the different shades of lipstick.

 

Yet, there’s a newcomer in town. The age of trial-and-error makeup and contradictory advices have lent a way to science, namely Pantone Color IQ. Launched in mid-2012, the app-enabled color tone matching system allows customers to find foundations that match their exact skin tone. With fans raving about the product, the Color IQ system is planned to expand into more of Sephora’s 1,300 stores.

 

Since its 15 years in existence, Sephora has been the dominant beauty retailer largely through its successful brand campaigns. As it now faces stronger competition from online stores and more budget-friendly stores like Ulta, Sephora must answer to the problem any retailer faces when they sell the same products as others: It must create a genuine and exclusive product mix.

 

One solution lies in collaborations. If Target’s impressive sales and web crashes from Missoni and Jason Wu collection indicated anything, Sephora strives to go even further. Its past exclusive offerings include Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen’s fragrance and Karl Lagerfeld’s makeup and doll collection. However, Sephora has been recently looking into the new breed of collaborations that have keen strategy behind them.

 

Brick + Click Beauty. While most retailers dread “show-rooming,” Sephora integrates online and offline experiences with in-store features like QR codes and iPads with Color IQ. Sephora’s extensive research on customer experience also revealed that its Pinterest users visit twice more frequently and spend ten times more than its Facebook fans. In order to target more receptive buyers, Sephora devotes most of their time and resources on Pinterest rather than Facebook, where they have more than 5 million followers. The Pinterest users, in turn, will return to the stores. Hence, the collaboration between digital and the traditional retail team is synergistic.

 

Industry Collaboration. Some of the most undervalued collaborations can be found outside of adjacent industries. While Pantone may have not been the first thing that came to mind when it comes to beauty, there is an a-ha moment in the aftermath. Pantone provides scientific credibility, which Sephora has long sought in its brand image.

 

Broaden customers’ brand perception. One of the major benefits of collaborations is that you can cross-pollinate your audience. In their new store in NYC’s Meatpacking District, Sephora brought in local artist E.V. Day to create a large-scale installation about female empowerment and sexuality. By collaborating with the artist, Sephora enriched customer experience and expanded the perception of their brand beyond shopping.

 

In a world where technology allows companies to expand at an unprecedented speed, finding the right strategic partnerships is key to gaining quick brand recognition and awareness. As a result, companies must cross industry borders and bring new perspectives into their brand.

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