Decoding behaviour: How beauty companies are deploying AI marketing tools to gain consumer insight

Considering how rapidly consumer behaviour can change, companies face a Sisyphean task of sifting through swaths of information gathered through online and offline interactions with consumers to glean insight into their inner workings

With disruptions like the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis, these changes are shifting faster and more intensely than before.

“Because of the current situation, people's interests are changing quite dramatically, and their behaviour is shifting with the changing environment and circumstances,” ​said Charles Ng, VP enterprise AI of Appier, a Taiwan-based company that specialises artificial intelligence-based marketing solutions.

The company has worked with several beauty and personal care brands such as Estée Lauder, John Masters Organics, Nivea and AXE.

Ng added that it was important to stay on top of these insights which fluctuate on a daily basis.

To help business better understand their consumer base, Appier uses AIXON, a data science platform that helps analyse consumer data and make predictions

“When you're talking about consumer profiles, you’re not talking about a static thing. Usually these insights will change over time. It's important that we are generating these insights on a very regular basis. In fact, we do it on a daily basis.”​

Uncovering new insights​

The company has worked with Neogence, a Taiwanese derma beauty brand known for its facial masks and hyaluronic acid products, to utilise AIXON.

“One of the functionalities of AIXON is the ability to give a company insight based not just based on their activities on their website but outside of the website as well,”​ explained Ng.

The brand’s main digital channel is its official website, which can give it a narrow view of consumer insights, said Ng

“For brands like Neogence, the external behaviour is more important because for very specific brands like these, they typically do not know about what's going on with their customer base outside their website.”​

By partnering with Appier, the brand used data from AIXON to uncover new insights into their consumers.

“By analysing these insights, they found out that their customer base was especially interested in environmental issues – an interest they did not see come up before,” ​said Ng.

The company translated this insight into product development and launched a reef-safe sunscreen in to address their consumers’ environment concerns.

Additionally, it also used that information to drive offline marketing activities, such as sponsoring a beach cleaning event along the north coast of Taiwan that generated positive publicity for the brand.

Additionally, Neogence partnered with Appier to develop a marketing strategy in 2018 for the Singles’ Day, also known as the Double Eleven shopping festival.

The strategy was carried out in three stages and helped the brand to acquire customers, trigger potential demand and re-engage cart abandoners.

The brand was also able to identify new users with similar behaviour and develop two best-performing lookalike audience segments: one for those who purchased products on the Neogence website in the past eight weeks, and the other for those who browsed Neogence’s webpages for limited offers.

“With Appier’s data science platform, Neogence did not have to guess user profiles and user journeys anymore. AI helped the brand unify fragmented data, explore users’ off-site behaviour, and predict future actions that customers might take.”​

By leveraging AIXON, Neogence successfully reached new customers, enhanced brand awareness and optimised cost-per-click (CPC). It saw a 14% increase in ROI, an 87% jump in the website retention rate, and a 11% drop in CPC.