Glossier: Co-Creating a Cult Brand with a Digital

Community

A project report submitted in partial fulfilment

of the requirements of the course
Customer Relationship Management, Term V

Submitted by:
Group No.: 2
Section: A
Arundhati Mahapatro (19P011)
Ayushi Garg (19P013)
Anamika Bharucha (19P014)
Chahat Bhatia (19P015)
Garima Tyagi (19P018)
Dhiren Gurunani (19P019)
Rohankumar Jadhav (19P022)

Submitted to:
Prof. Neelu Bhullar

MANAGEMENT DEVELOPMENT INSTITUTE

Gurgaon

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Contents

About Glossier …………………………………………………………………..1

Evaluating Alternatives ………………………………………………………....6
Concepts ………………………………………………………………………...9

Business Use Cases ……………………………………………………………12

Recommendations ..……………………………………………………………14

Learnings ……………………………………………………………………...15

References ……………………………………………………………………..16

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Glossier

Glossier grew out of CEO Emily Weiss’s beauty blog, Into The Gloss. The blog that was
popular particularly amongst millennials as well as the brand Glossier reinvented beauty that
celebrated the originality and individuality of its users.

Glossier’s strong willingness to forge personal relationships among people gave rise to its
simple yet powerful strategy of “born from content, fuelled by community”. Community was
at the center of everything Glossier did and the way it ensured that was through the sharing of
quality digital content on the blog for a huge base of 1.5 million enthusiastic readers and brand
advocates who in turn helped inspire new products.

Second half of 2018-

• Massive funding of $52 million Series C round on Feb 18
• Engaging Glossier’s growing community
• Using relationships to create a social, socially driven brand
• Evaluating traditional ways of relationship management

Traditional ways of relationship management:

Into The Gloss beauty blog and Instagram
Direct-to-consumer e-commerce sales- millennial-friendly digital properties
“Marketing without marketing” i.e. marketing is there, but it doesn’t feel like it- Customers are
willing to advertise Glossier for free e.g. by downloading Glossier wallpapers.

Decisions to be taken-

1. Greater emphasis on paid media and/or a more physical market presence

2. Whether to convert Glossier’s evangelistic consumers into paid peer-to-peer sales
representatives, whether to engage professional influencers, and how to continue to use
the community to inspire new product ideas as it diversified beyond early adopters
3. Whether to expand Glossier’s availability beyond the digital to physical retail

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Creating a Trusted Voice and Building a Community-
• A brand that reinvented beauty by establishing that beauty regimes don’t have to be
prescriptive by a select few.
• High quality content
• Access to industry experts
• Daily beauty routines of inspiring individuals in candid conversations #itgtopshelfie
• Approachable, conversational
• Converting passive beauty consumers into active- sharing vulnerabilities, owning
regimes, being their own experts
• Glossier set out to launch with four everyday essentials in October 2014- delivering a
luxury experience and encouraging beauty as a part of an overall personal style

Taking on Big Beauty

• $433 billion global beauty industry, projected to grow to $750 billion by 2024
• Dominated by eight companies
• Over 80% of beauty and personal care products were purchased through physical
retailers
• Direct-to-consumer digital brands were gaining traction.
• Less loyal generation of consumers
• All brands were leveraging social media and influencer marketing to speak directly with
consumers

Glossier helped women adopt a more individualistic perspective of beauty from the existing
norm of women being told what beauty is and beautiful means because of the hegemony of a
few big brands. Now, influence is decentralised- Social media is the gateway to this
transformation- peer recommendations- YouTube- products were becoming separated from
brands.
In beauty, products were just commodities- Glossier wanted to change that to create a cult like
following and strong affinities in the beauty industry.

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Community Inspired R&D

Glossier used “Into the Gloss” for its R&D and on an average launched 1 product in six
weeks. By 2018, they had 26 products, ranging from $12 to $60. When people read the blog
and commented with their views, they felt like they were talking to an actual person who
understood them and one they could relate to.

Glossier interacted with top customers on Slack and also in person at NYC office. They
continuously tried to a create a “brand as peer” image rather than “brand as authority”

The initial idea to final output timeframe was very large for Glossier, at times even a year, like
in the case of Milky Jelly. By mid-2016, Glossier had 60,000 people on waiting lists for
products, and this wasn’t a tactic to create product buzz. The challenge was to sustain in the
long run with the current model was difficult. The company was confused between product
development on hero products to create product loyalty or create a fuller product line that would
increase brand loyalty.

Emily wanted to build Glossier as a way of life.

Building a social brand

Glossier focused on making people feel good about their skin, unlike other brands that
prospered by making women feel insecure of their appearance. The copywriters responded as
if responding to friends, and information about Glossier was also shared like any other brand.
Their reusable pink bubble wrap packaging became a symbol of being part of the Glossier
community. They launched branded merchandise on public demand - sweatshirts, totes etc

The Cult of Glossier

Customers posted online like fangirls, waiting for the next product release. The company
assigned marketing tasks to their passionate customers. In one month, they sold equivalent to

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their target for the entire year. These sales were mostly backed by customer’s peer-to-peer
efforts

In the second half of 2017, customers tagged @Glossier in over 50,000 Instagram posts,
generating a reach of over 17 million. More than 60% of customers were between the ages of
18–35. 72% claimed that they stayed in touch with friends on social media, and 48% said they
sought opinions and inspiration from people on social media. Most came to the brand following
a friend’s recommendation. Accounting to this, peer-to-peer outreach accounted for 25% of
new customers.

Evaluating Alternatives

1. Peer-to-Peer Sales Representative Program

This will help Glossier in establishing credibility and legitimacy with the beauty shoppers,
expand its community, and create numerous unique storefronts for people to shop online It will
help in enhancing the online shopping experience and improve the connection with the brand.
It is a low-cost option and a loyal consumer will have high motivation to work for Glossier.
At the same time, everyone might not want to be a content creator or be a good one and a
particular customer might not have sufficient number of followers. This method also might
reduce trust and authenticity as people will see it as a paid advertisement.

Peer-to-peer sales is an ideal option as Glossier is driven by its community and has established
an existing cult of loyal customers who provide it with huge user generated content. Customers
are passionate about the brand and want to tell people about beauty and skin care. Most came
to the brand following a friend’s recommendation and peer-to-peer outreach. Connecting with
customers who are loyal as well as highly active on social media would enable the company to
bring in the right customer.

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2. Professional Influencer Marketing Program

This program will help in establishing credibility and authenticity with the product as in a D2C
product people are unable to have the touch and feel experience. The company can leverage
the existing follower base of famous influencers and experienced content creators to expand its
community which also allows it to do promotions on a wide scale.

But the program is costly for as professional influencers charge high prices for a single post.
Even the price of reaching 1,000 followers could run from $15–50 or higher for famous
influencers. Also, professional influencers might have low motivation to work for Glossier as
they already have huge following.

3. Paid Media Spending

Increasing spending on paid media will help in generating brand impressions. The company
was experiencing falling customer acquisition costs; hence this might be an attractive option in
the long run. It might also lead to earned media.

Though paid media is less attractive as compared earned media as high number of branded
touchpoints are required before making a purchase. The increasing competition in the online
space will lead to high advertising costs as well as there is possibility of diminishing returns in
future. Another demerit is that paid media might not reach the targeted audience, rather people
who might not associate with Glossier’s brand.

4. Customer Loyalty Program

Customer loyalty program would include providing benefits such as discounts, free samples,
early access to new products, and invitations to special events, etc to customers. Such programs
will help improve retention of existing customers. They will also help in providing better
insights into data of customers. This will also help strengthen relationship with customers and
further drive their frequency of purchase. They will help in improving Brand advocacy through
word of mouth marketing.

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One of the disadvantages of loyalty programs is that it’s difficult to pinpoint from where
customer’s loyal behaviour will actually come from. More than often, it appears that the one
who is a frequent buyer is a loyal one. But that may not be the case, as he may be buying from
the company just because that’s convenient for him. Or, he may be buying just for the benefits
that the loyalty program is giving him in the form of rewards. Thus, loyalty, which in essence
is an emotion, may not be gauged by the loyalty program. Also, they increase costs and affect
the bottom-line due to discounts and offers to customers. Also, Loyalty programs hope to bring
more repurchases based on the historical behaviour of customers. But with time, their incomes,
needs, and lifestyles change. Naturally, their buying patterns also change. Hence, past
Customer Profitability Doesn’t Always Guarantee Future Profitability.

5. Retail Showrooms and Pop-ups

Retail Showrooms and Pop-Ups would include setting up physical stores where customers can
walk-in and try and buy products at one place. This will have multiple benefits such as it
addresses the consumer barrier ‘Touch and feel’ of Ecommerce platforms. It will also help
further to build customer community as it will provide a place for consumers to interact with
like-minded people. It will also improve high frequency of repeat purchases through
experiential shopping. And also improve the content creation opportunities.

This comes with some disadvantages such as setting up and running a retail showroom would
involve high capital costs. Also, such showrooms will cater to only a small portion of
consumers and hence scaling it up is a major issue. Also, from the previous trends, it has been
observed that offline consumers generally refrain from shopping online and only 30% of
showroom shoppers moved to e-commerce for their subsequent purchases.

6. Other Options – Theme Parties and Wholesale model

Theme parties would include engaging consumers to hold product parties in their homes (Like
that of traditional Tupperware parties). This will help in building an engaging customer
community and will provide a place for consumers to interact with like-minded people. It will
also improve Brand advocacy through word of mouth marketing.

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This will have some disadvantages like scale will be an issue as it will engage only small
portion of consumers at such parties. Conducting such parties will have high costs.
Wholesale model would include selling products through traditional Wholesale and retail
model. This traditional model will help improved sales and distribution through established
model due to the scale it provides. It will also provide multiple selling points for the brand and
in turn increased reach for the products.

This will have some disadvantages such as it can lead to dilution of Brand exclusivity. It will
also completely stop interaction with and amongst consumers. Also, it will have no
opportunities for content creation at all.

Concepts

Customer Buying Journey

Glossier should have various touchpoints with the customer in his/her entire journey of
buying the product.

Awareness: Consumer awareness is an act to make sure that the consumer knows about the
products and its related information. Glossier should use both online and offline mode of
communication to reach the consumers.

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Consideration: Glossier compares different products in blogs where they evaluate them
basis of their performance. In order to get Glossier’s products in consumer consideration set,
it has a retail outlet which is an experimental and experience store. Blogs and social media
posts do it in the online medium.

Purchase: This is the last step in lead closing. Glossier majorly focuses on online medium to
sell its products.

Retention: Customer retention refers to the ability of a company or product to retain its
customers over some specified period. Glossier retains customers with new launches, emails
and social media engagement activities.

Advocacy: Customer advocacy is a specialized form of customer service in which companies

focus on what is deemed to be best for the customer. Glossier uses peer-to-peer interaction
and online blogs as medium to connect with professionals.

Customer Retention

Glossier registered an explosive growth but it needs to retain customers for frequent
repurchase. This will drastically reduce its customer acquisition cost and increase the
customer lifetime value. To increase traffic on its website and blog, it can advertise as 50% of
impressions came from paid media. It can help bloggers to improve their content as 20% of
impressions came peer-to-peer interactions/

One approach will not be useful for every customer, hence, it should analytics to say where
the customers are dropping off and try to offer them a personalized version of emails.

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Glossier provides superlative experience in its retail outlet and converts new customers who
mainly shop online.

Customer Acquisition Framework

Customer acquisition funnel is a process/place where we can turn potential into customers.
Marketing Team is responsible for generating leads and segmenting them on their potential.
Glossier used its blogs and earned media to reach potential customers. The sales team
onboards the potential buyer on the platform and close the deal. Glossier tried to provide an
experience while shopping online rather than just another shopping website. Customer
Success Team is responsible for furthering the current partnership and converting a one-time
customer into a loyal customer. Glossier used blogs to have frequent conversations with its
customers and also promoted peer-to-peer interaction.

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Business Use Cases

Social commerce is coming up in the world in a big way. By 2025, Indian social commerce
market expected to become a US$100B market. These developments are not just confined to
the B2C market. The social commerce sector has made its way into the B2B space as well
aiding the boom of eB2B sector as a whole. India by all means is set to be the biggest eB2B
market and the market size by 2025 could be over $60 billion. Before we look into some such
leading developments, let us evaluate some drivers for the same.

Key drivers

1. Expanding customer base due to internet penetration

2. Lowering of overhead expenses
3. Increasing interest from investors (More than 50 PE/VC)

1. International

A Chinese company called Pinduoduo is said to be a pioneer is social shopping. It crossed

500M active buyers in 4 years using group buying. Alibaba took 15 years to increase its active
user base to that same number. And out of total (Monthly Active Users) MAU, 70% are
women and 55% are from tier-III and tier –IV.
Let us look at Pinduoduo’s GMV numbers:

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So, what does it exactly do?

2. National

A. Mall91

It is a live video-based social shopping marketplace which has recently gained a lot of traction
in the Indian market. The main idea behind is this is it facilitates peer-to-peer shopping
experience and also helps to provide a platform to build a social shopping community. It has
also won Atmanirbhar Bharat app innovation challenge. It aims to be a one-stop solution for
400 million vernacular internet users across various Indian cities. The app contains many
features. It has vernacular language catalogues that can be browsed with voice commands. For
facilitating faster order processing, it has WhatsApp based checkouts. Many investors are
interested in this. It raised US$ 7.5M from Go Ventures as well.

B. BulBul.tv

This happens to be an extremely famous app in tier-II and tier-III cities of India and it is known
for its video based social shopping experience, especially for clothes. It offers group buying
and social sharing features to users that lets them involve their peers in the purchase. It thereby
has been successful in building a community using its features. It recently raised US$ 5 million
in a round led by Sequoia.

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Recommendations:

Peer-to-Peer Sales:

• Peer to Peer sales representative program will be in tandem with the existence and
philosophy of Glossier, i.e., its community of users.
• This will also enhance the customer-to-customer relationship which is the major
purpose of Glossier, even more than customer-to-brand relationships, as the brand
philosophy of democratized beauty suggests that brands should no more define beauty
standards.
• This will also encourage people to come up with their own versions of beauty and
further enhance the quality of content as well as discussions on the platform.
• When it comes to social media influencers, generally the top influencers tend to charge
hefty prices while their motivation and dedication to work is low for start-ups like
Glossier.
• However, loyal customers of Glossier having a decent enough following on social
media will work wonders for the company as they will be much more motivated to work
for Glossier than professional influencers. Secondly, the cost associated with them will
be on a lower side.

Retail Stores:

• The platform Into the Gloss and the brand Glossier have their presence exclusively in
the online space. A retail store will help spread this idea of Glossier, democratized
beauty in the offline space as well.
• Glossier should invest in Experience retail stores, primarily focusing on providing a
platform for the customers to come and indulge in the beauty related discussions,
similar to those on their blog, while also trying the product offerings of Glossier.
• This will help customers to overcome the barrier of “Touch and feel” attribute of the
product which was present in the online shopping experience.
• Furthermore, it will also provide customers indulging in discussions to actually create
new, personalized, tangible content for the blog.

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 • It will also help the company to create authentic customer stories which can be used for
marketing purposes.

Learnings

Case Learnings
• Understanding the paid media spend on social media channels and touchpoints
involved: With advertising shifting towards social media, the paid media is growing
significantly from the past few years. It is more effective in reaching to the TG and has
significantly lower costs when compared to traditional media. However, this cost
benefit is not expected to last long since all of the companies have started crowding the
space resulting in increasing costs. Moreover, it also involves too many touchpoints
before the actual conversion

• Constantly engaging with your customers and making them feel heard and part
of the community: In order to create strong customer loyalty, the brand needs to make
the customer feel important and valued by the company. This was done very beautifully
by involving customers in discussing, opinionating and designing beauty products that
they needed, for themselves. Moreover, open discussions regarding beauty was initiated
which created a strong bond amongst themselves and in turn with the idea of a
democratised beauty

• Leveraging loyal customer base as influencers for your brand and for peer-to-peer
sales: When customers feel valued and appreciated, they start advocating for your
product and this was rightly used by Glossier by incentivising the customers to refer,
promote and induce Glossier sales in their network and get loyalty benefits and
discounts in return.

• Leveraging community for new product developments(crowdsourcing) and

generating paid media(UGC, word of mouth): Again, similar to the peer-to-peer
sales concept, when customers were engaged in discussions about beauty, they were
also allowed and encouraged to design a democratized beauty product for themselves
that didn't confirm with the set notions of beauty but on the true essence of it as

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 communicated by Glossier. They used these insights to design the product and also
generated media by engaging customers to talk about real beauty products.

Research Learnings

• Understanding the customer buying journey: Various steps constitute the customer
buying journey. With the advent of online shopping, the journey also sees some
modification with respect to inspection of the product and how exactly the customer
assesses the product. However, once a prospective customer is converted to a user,
pushing him further down the funnel to become an advocate is an interesting journey
especially in the online E-commerce industry

• Various methods and techniques to influence customers in their buying journey,

to acquire and retain them: Since the buying process is evolving, the techniques of
influencing the customers is also adapting with the changing process. With customers
constantly shifting towards online shopping, the online influencers are more powerful
than ever in shifting customers towards or away from the product. Similarly, the
methods to acquire and retain customers have also evolved and adapted to the virtual
environment.

• Impact and importance of social E-commerce: Social E-commerce, primarily

referring to social influencers and social media acting as a point of sale and/or
influencing the sales decision by large, has increasingly gained importance in the recent
years. This was aptly highlighted in the way Glossier was established and functioned
as a company.

• Growth of social media marketing: With the younger generation always on social
media, the businesses have also become socially active in order to reach out to their
target audience in an effective and efficient manner. As a result, this category is
growing exponentially by the day.

• Better understanding of new trends in the beauty industry: With traditional beauty
brands working towards selling their products by defining unrealistic beauty standards,

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 Glossier made a difference in having intimate discussions with its customers regarding
natural beauty. This was the beginning of a new trend in the beauty industry and since
then, this trend has only grown and gained traction from even more customers.

• Deep dived into nuances of influencer marketing: Influencers have flooded social
media with content on every topic and industry. While celebrities are considered
unapproachable, influencers are very much approachable by the common customers
and they consider influencers as people next door, sharing information and tips about
products and services they have experienced. Hence, they have become a highly
preferred means of promotion of products and services as against traditional marketing
techniques used by businesses.

References
1. https://www.bain.com/insights/how-india-shops-online/
2. https://www.bigcommerce.com/blog/social-commerce/#the-history-of-social-commerce
3. https://www.forbesindia.com/article/work-in-progress/how-social-commerce-is-changing-
etail-in-india/56535/1
4. https://yourstory.com/2020/03/rise-social-commerce-startups-india-meesho-bulbul
5. https://benoriknowledge.com/insight/social-commerce-in-india/
6. https://influencermarketinghub.com/what-is-influencer-marketing/
7. https://sproutsocial.com/insights/influencer-marketing/
8. https://www.wordstream.com/social-media-marketing
9. https://buffer.com/social-media-marketing
10. https://go.octoly.com/insights-brands/glossier
11. https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/1/15/18184151/glossier-emily-weiss-marketing-
strategy-recode

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