South Korean Beauty brands move beauty counseling services online as pandemic hinders face-to-face sales
As the coronavirus pandemic has yet to show signs of abating, the beauty industry in South Korea is joining other countries in focusing more on non-contact online counseling and diagnoses.
In South Korea, door-to-door sales performed by beauty counselors (i.e. the beauty division staff of a company) was something that supported the sales of brick-and-mortar department stores and duty-free stores as well as e-commerce sales networks. On top of this, they were also an important sales channel for major cosmetics manufacturers, including Amorepacific and LG Household & Health Care.
Back in 2019 before the pandemic began, Amorepacific deployed around 30,000 door-to-door sales counselors who sold to roughly 2.5 million customers. Sales from door-to-door counselors also achieved a record US$1.6 billion in one particular year (2016). However, with the emergence of the new coronavirus, door-to-door counseling and sales have become a no-go, and instead, there has been a shift among beauty businesses towards intensively training staff to make full use of internal counseling apps and online systems.
On the other hand, LG Household & Health Care, which employs around 20,000 door-to-door counselors, has shifted to training counselors online via smartphones and social media. However, even if you exclude the heavyweights of Amorepacific and LG, South Korea has plenty of manufacturers and brands that rely on door-to-door as a main method of sales. While the market continues under conditions that prevent face-to-face contact, there is an accelerating trend towards shifting counseling from offline to online.
Currently trending in South Korea as a tool for contactless online counseling is AI-driven “skin diagnosis systems”, as well as some other related solutions.
“Muilli” by South Korean beauty startup Lillycover is one such online counseling solution that acquires and analyzes users’ skin data and displays advice in real-time. It consists of a custom device and smartphone app.
By answering questions and photographing your skin with the device’s camera, you can check your skin’s level of sensitivity, wrinkles, oiliness, moisture, and pores, among other properties, and it will diagnose which skin type you correspond to out of 40 different types. Based on that, it will provide skincare advice and recommend skincare products developed in-house by Lillycover. A unique point is how the device can also be used as a facial massager. On top of this, the acquired data is logged so that both Lillycover and the user themselves can keep track of changes in the user’s skin condition.
Companies search for the “new common sense” of online counseling
Despite this emergence of startups and services that specialize in skin diagnoses and counseling systems, some beauty brands are starting their own online counseling services.
In July 2020, Amorepacific added a mobile-only skin analysis function called “Skin Finder” to their e-commerce site APMALL. This was a medical examination-style online counseling system that used original calculations and analysis methods to analyze customers’ skin type and skin issues based on their answers to around 20 questions. After the examination, the customer is given tips for their skin issues, helpful information, and recommendations on related products.
Dermatological cosmetics brand Dr. G run by Gowoonsesang Cosmetics plans to upgrade their online counseling service “My Skin Mentor”, which was released in 2016. My Skin Mentor has already collected volumes of data on the skin of around 330,000 people and based on that data the company will try to expand its AI counseling service.
Gowoonsesang Cosmetics also released the AI chatbot service “Mentor G” in September 2020. The service can be accessed by clicking on a character icon on their official website and it features a range of functions that can all be performed using the app’s chat feature — not only skin consultations but also the Baumann Skin Type Test*, product curation depending on lifestyle, skincare recommendations, and even inquiries, orders, and deliveries of products.
At the end of December 2020, ABLE C&C, which runs brands Missha and nunc among others, released a beta version of their application service “Beauty Talk” under the new concept of beauty counseling commerce. This is a service where you can chat 1-on-1 with a store staff member, as opposed to AI, and it allows you to purchase any products you become interested in directly from the app.
As we can see, South Korea is currently at a stage where there isn’t yet shared online counseling or sales platform that many brands use together, like for example the app “Hero”, and so brands and manufacturers are taking matters into their own hands, using their own original ideas.
The culture of direct selling, where customers want to buy from someone they trust and that knows them well, has taken root in South Korea, as reflected in the pervasion of door-to-door sales in the country. Due to this, the impact of the pandemic has brought about enough harm to threaten the existence of major companies that deal in beauty products. The e-commerce conversion rate of South Korea’s beauty industry is said to be 20.1%, with online purchases steadily increasing. Thus within the industry, there is currently a debate as to whether after the pandemic has died down it is worth going back to focusing on direct face-to-face selling as much as was done pre-pandemic.
*The Baumann Skin Type Test is a skin type diagnosis proposed by American dermatologist Dr. Leslie Baumann that classifies skin through the four attributes of sebum secretion, sensitivity, pigment, and wrinkles and allows people to find their skin type out of a total of 16 types.
Text: Ching Li Tor
Original text (Japanese) : Jonggi HA
