Glossier: A New Age of Marketing

Glossier

Glossier is a makeup and skincare brand that has experienced wild success, despite relying only on their online website for sales and using almost no paid media advertising. Their products are intended to help women highlight the most natural beauty possible, emphasizing simplicity and shine. This value proposition is vastly different from other prominent makeup brands of the past few decades: L’Oréal, Clinique, bareMinerals, Urban Decay and others. Makeup brands have historically focused on offering women ways to change their look, cover imperfections, and express creativity.

Glossier has rejected these ideas and picked up on the social media trend emphasizing natural beauty and “no makeup” makeup looks. Their goal is to allow women to feel like they have enhanced their natural beauty without covering up their features. The brand has gained a large following in a short amount of time and many have questioned how it gained popularity so quickly.

Innovative Product and Message

A major contributing factor to Glossier’s success is the fact that the company identified a growing trend in the beauty industry that was not successfully met by other makeup and skincare brands. The move away from full faces of makeup to natural, glowing skin has been embraced on social media over the last few years, particularly on Instagram. Glossier capitalized on this in a way no other brand has by building an entire product line around simplicity and natural beauty.

The brand not only followed the trend of natural beauty, but used its platform and collections to further the movement favoring natural, glowy skin to full face makeup looks. Most importantly, Glossier took the trend a step further, making sure its customers knew that the products weren’t just about the appearance, but the emotional layer that comes along with embracing a more natural face. This use of affect in their marketing campaigns took an instagram trend of glowing skin and turned it into a movement akin to body positivity, inspiring confidence in a generation of girls who constantly compare themselves via social media.

Instagram Advertising

One of the most unique aspects of Glossier’s rise to popularity is that the company used very little traditional advertising to build its brand. Instead, it relied almost entirely on social media, using influencers to help gain popularity.

The company introduced “pop up shops” in major cities with mirrors prompting customers to take pictures and post them on social media. This meant that the brand recognition of Glossier spread almost entirely through digital communication and word-of-mouth via social media, which is a rather new phenomenon for brands in this category. These marketing strategies have led Glossier to be dubbed one of the most “Instagrammable” brands to date. While that may not seem like much of a feat, Glossier has taken over the platform that their target audience, 18-30 year old women, spend hours on every day.

User Generated Content

Hand in hand with instagram advertising comes user generated content. UGC is a marketing tool so full of potential yet it is theoretically free. More so than many other brands, even those who focus on instagram marketing, Glossier has taken advantage of user generated content in a way that has dramatically grown its brand. Those mirrors in pop-up shops prompting customers to take photos? UGC magnets. The aesthetically pleasing photos that are bound to arise from this setup are posted on customers accounts and, through the magic of hashtags, all linked to create a pool of content for Glossier to use on its own social media.

In addition, if those customers have a significant following, they are promoting Glossier on their own page. While Glossier certainly pays influencers with impressive followings to promote its products as a sponsorship, many instagram users love the photos so much they post them for free, not even realizing that they are one piece of the puzzle that Glossier has used to grow its brand to $100 million a year in sales in only 10 years.