By Michael Brown @mbrown_beauty michaelbrownbeauty.com.au
Every beauty brand has its own identity and messaging, which requires a point of difference at point of sale, one that should be portrayed at all times by the beauty advisors.
Each beauty brand will also attract a certain consumer…some will target a wider audience and some, a more specific market, with age groups, skin type, trends or ingredients being the main attraction.
As a beauty advisor and/or retail makeup artist, we all have our personal favourites. After all, we too are consumers. However the brand we represent, must be the messaging we present to our audience, being our customer – hence why we must align ourselves with brands/product we would actually use. This is such an important part of ‘being true’ in retail and to your repeat business.
My personal experience with makeup started when I was a dancer growing up…on stage, we had to use certain techniques to open our eyes and give structure to our face – this is now commonly known as contouring!
So when I started working as a retail makeup artist within department stores all over W.A. back in 2000, all my customers got smokey eyes and red lips, with a bit of contouring, something I loved and thought, who wouldn’t love that look?
But, in retail, we are all about sales + customer satisfaction and when I looked around at other beauty advisors, their makeup skills may not have been as advanced, but they were getting sales, something that took me a while to understand and I had to know why!
I went on a learning curve and found out it was all about them not me!
Speak to your customer, find out her lifestyle, her concerns, her needs for makeup and from there design a look suited to her, she then has ownership that the look/products are prescribed to her only and are easy to follow throughout her lifestyle.
This is why your own personal image when representing a brand’s messaging, needs to be aligned, so you attract the right customer to your counter.
- Be on brand
- Know your customer
- Understand it’s about THEM not YOU
- Provide a solution to THEIR concerns -don’t create new ones by over selling or complicating
- Teach them, don’t scare them