Covergirl Utilizes AR And More For Personalized Beauty
The highly-anticipated launch of the Covergirl Time Square flagship store officially opened its doors on Black Friday, November 23, 2018. The brand’s first permanent two-level retail store was designed to embody the Covergirl “I Am What I Make Up” brand philosophy, where consumers can immerse themselves in an experiential beauty playground centrally located in the epicenter of New York City — 7th Avenue and West 49th Street.
The new store was expected to feature some “ultimate shared beauty experience”. Customers will be greeted by Olivia, a virtual greeter powered by Dialogflow, Google’s platform, for creating natural and artificial-intelligence-powered conversations. Olivia will answer questions, share beauty trend advice and direct customers to their preferred product.
Moreover, augmented reality glam stations, powered by Holition, allow customers to virtually pick up their owned color choice in the tray and try a lipstick and eyeshadow on. The look can be completed with coordinating blushed, mascaras and foundation, and visitors can digitally share their virtual makeover to their friends. Customization station let shoppers personalize a lipstick and makeup bag. A team of Covergirl BFFs will be also on hand to offer tips, tricks and product recommendations.
Insight:
Physical spaces will be “digitized”
Some retailers like Covergirl have already started down digitized path to move beyond established, though still rudimentary, personalization practices. At Covergirl’s new flagship store, despite an AI-powered program directing customers, while augmented-reality glam stations letting customers “virtually try” products, Covergirl still need salesperson and stylist.
These virtual experiences still need the human touch. Covergirl’s glam stations still need customers to tell stylists what products they’d like to try. But the trend message is clear: As AI evolves, systems can generate recommendations based on analyzing a customer’s skin tone, facial features, and emotions in real time to tailor what to recommend or avoid offering. An insight by McKinsey agrees that “the next level of in-store personalization is likely to include pulling in more advanced AR features to help customers experience products and services in different environments”.
Beyond AR, personalizing shopping funnel
Covergirl takes various paths on personalization marketing than just AR. Covergirl monitors market and trends and quickly response to better its customer personalization need. When KVD Beauty’s Good Apple foundation (nearly $40/item) was going viral in March, TikToker Jada Irene Collins posted that she had found a drugstore dupe. After that post going viral, Covergirl contacted Collins to put paid media behind the post and begin a relationship. What’s more, after partnering with Collins, Covergirl worked with e-commerce platform MikMak to track how users responded with their wallets. Covergirl wants insights into the efficacy of the influencer’s content in driving actual purchases, and develops a better understanding of where their brand’s consumers prefer to shop, and then design the personalized shopping funnel for each customer. The campaign launched shortly, and it was reported that the add-to-cart rate was 5.4 times higher than the category benchmark on TikTok, 38% higher than the next highest performing channel in the time period.
-Charles
