Embracing naturality in beauty

While naturality was already entrenched in categories like food, the natural beauty space had not yet achieved mainstream success.  L’Oreal was looking to get a deeper understanding of naturality & ethical beauty and dissect how consumer perceptions, needs and desires translated across different beauty segments like Makeup, Skincare, Haircare, Hair Color (at home) and Hair Styling. This would ultimately help them establish key benchmarks for innovation.

Our global insights work allowed us to unearth consumers’ underlying associations and concerns surrounding naturality in beauty, which had varying implications across product categories and potential target users. Ironically, "natural" in beauty care would seem to be a simple choice, but it's actually complicated, highly emotional and fraught with tension.

 Specifically, we uncovered fundamental challenges and tensions, revealing white space around:

• the perceived trade-off between performance and

• “safety”deficiencies in the  “experience” (both physical and emotional) delivered by current offerings

We also identified 4 distinct consumer mindsets that varied in their willingness to embrace natural and the tradeoffs, suggesting a way to potentially think about targeting across their vast brand portfolio.

Ultimately we recommended core imperatives for innovation to help the company work towards creating a distinctive natural space for their business.

Now that’s a beautiful thing (naturally speaking)!

What we did: Consumer Insights, Foresight Analysis