
Q: Marketing wise I’m doing all I should be to drive growth, and I’m getting the results. But is there anything out of the ordinary that I should be considering to help gain the edge on my competitors?
If you study marketing or read a stack of marketing strategy books, you’d be forgiven for thinking there’s a pretty solid playbook. All brands must do the same things in order to generate sales and grow. The idea that marketing is always formulaic has become even more prevalent in the age of social media — scroll through a social feed and you’ll see sponsored ads from marketing agencies that tell you, this is how to build your brand! Do these five things and you’ll sell more products!…and so on.
The problem with formulaic strategies is that they put you at risk of jumping through the marketing hoops because that’s what you think you’re supposed to do, when in fact some of those hoops are not a good fit for your brand. An agency might tell you that Instagram is essential to market a beauty brand, or that pop-ups are hot this year — but the truth is that some brands don’t do well on Instagram, and some consumer markets don’t attend (or like) pop-ups. So the job of a beauty marketing team isn’t just to understand how marketing works in 2022, and tick off all the things on the this-is-how-you-do-it list. You have to build a strategy from within the brand, rather than picking a strategy from the outside and forcing your brand to fit into it.
Sometimes, that means using techniques that seem counterintuitive if you’re looking at them through the lens of a set strategy. So here are a few of those counterintuitive techniques that can, in fact, be incredibly effective.