During TheIndustry.beauty LIVE! ‘Marketing In Beauty – The Next Frontier’ in partnership with More2 and Noatum Logistics, a crowd of beauty industry professionals learnt about the ways to deploy tech, data and creativity to stand out from the crowd, reach new customers and retain and grow existing customers.

For the third panel of the day, Kevin Davis, Chief Data Scientist at More2, and Rob Steeles, Creative Director at Eleven Miles, sat down with Lauretta Roberts to discuss why brands should combine maths (customer data analysis) with magic (creativity) to optimise marketing.

Both More2 and Eleven Miles are part of the Sideshow Group, which is made of 10 agents who use evidence and data to help their clients grow their businesses.

The Maths

Davis explains that brands are always competing with one another. However, rather than the common misconception that brands are competing for sales and footfalls, he explains that they’re only competing for customers.

It’s important to bridge creative and ideas-driven marketing with data and put the customer at the centre of every decision. But, only three numbers matter in terms of customers.  The starting base number (the number of people that you recruited and retained last year) doesn't change.

However, the following can be targeted through marketing strategies:

1.  Ordered rate – loyalty rate
2. Number of new people
3. How much customers are going to spend

This describes the top line.

More2 then uses fiscal year revenues to create a simple growth forecast calculation. This examines which of the three numbers the brand needs to work on to boost revenues. But then, the next question the brand should be asking itself is, 'Where do I invest my money to bring me profitable growth?' The duo challenged brands to ask where they are investing money and whether it is actually worth it.

Davis discourages looking at averages to create targets. Instead, target lifetime market consumers rather than one-timers and ensure you have the cash flow to invest in the marketing required to increase them.

The Magic

What the maths and data are missing is emotion, which matters now more than ever. The landscape has changed, it is completely different today than it was even five to ten years ago, for example.

Beauty brands have been guilty of depicting beauty in a predictable way in the past. Visually, flawlessness, photoshopping and editing lack emotion and connection. With this, beauty marketing has been guilty of making people feel bad rather than good.

Despite beauty products' seemingly surface-level nature, there's emotion behind using products. People don't need cosmetics, but primarily they use specific lotions and positons because they make them feel better. The concept of 'beauty rituals' goes to show the emotional connection we have with products and our beauty routines.

Steele quoted Maya Angelo: "What I've learned is that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. "

He continued, "How can we make deeper connections through your brand?"

Beauty has become very technical. So, rather than approaching customers as if they're scientists, instead, approach them as emotional beings. For example, ads that we remember the most are the ones we have an emotional connection to. Steele said: "Emotions make us buy. Emotions make us form brand loyalty."

He spoke about the few 'magic tricks' brands can implement to evoke emotion. When working on the creative briefing, rather than starting with what you want the customers to 'think, feel and do'  flip it to 'feel, think and do'. This way, the feeling will be at the heart of the storytelling and build an instant connection with soon-to-be life-long customers.