PHOTOS COURTESY OF GLOSSIER16 SEPTEMBER 2, 2019 | ADWEEK
®With a million Glossier customers
acquired just last year, how do you
build meaningful relationships at
that scale? Scaling our connection
with each of our customers is what
will allow us to build a successful and
enduring business. Digital experiences
enable us to do that across a number
of channels, from Glossier.com to
Instagram to Inside the Gloss to our
customer experience team (which
we call the gTEAM). Most customer
experience teams are trained to
minimize contact with customers or
direct them to an alternative channel to
be as efficient as possible—that is the
opposite of how we think about CX.
How have you been able to
differentiate the brand through
marketing? We center our marketing
efforts around the experiences
we create for our customers and
community: physical (product)
experiences, digital experiences and
offline (retail) experiences. We inspire
people to take part in our journey,
and when we do that successfully,
we end up with a vibrant and diverse
community of people who are
stakeholders in Glossier.
What’s one eye-opening thing
you’ve learned about your
consumer? Our customers share a
psychographic, not a demographic.
... They post our products on social
media, bring friends to visit our
stores and even bond with strangers
over matching Glossier stickers on
their phones. Glossier is also being
“passed up” from younger to older
generations, which is a role reversal
from how beauty has historically been
shared cross-generationally. Sharing
and connection are what make our
customers our biggest advocates:
We’re tagged in 20,000 user-generated
posts per month on Instagram (not
including Stories), and 70% of our
customers come through person-to-
person referrals, earned media and
owned channels.What are the biggest changes in the
beauty industry right now, and how
is Glossier staying ahead of them?
Social media has given consumers
a platform to use their voice and be
their own expert. Beauty consumers
specifically are no longer flocking to
brands or department store counters
for information and expertise; instead,
they’re sharing their routines on
Instagram, watching makeup tutorials
on YouTube and messaging a friend to
ask their opinion before purchasing a
product. While the democratization of
expertise has upended the structure
of traditional beauty companies, it’s
been the foundation of ours since day
one. We are leveraging the voices of
our customers to co-create the future
beauty company.With now two storefronts and
expanding into pop-ups, what role
do you see offline retail playing
for the brand? Just like our digital
and physical product experiences,
our offline experiences are meant to
inspire our customers to participate in
Glossier. By doing this, we’re creating
value from a brand and revenue
perspective—both are important
metrics. Our flagship store in New
York, which averages 50,000 visitors
per month, has a conversion rate of
50%. Those same visitors are also
creating incredible content and
developing meaningful connections
with our team and with each other.How do you maintain a holistic view
of each customer with both online
and offline experiences? Because
we’re engaging with [customers]
at every touch point, none of the
experiences we create live in isolation.
For example, people who visit our
store are testing physical product
and sharing the experience digitally
by taking pictures, posting them to
social and tagging us. We’ve built data
infrastructure around that 360 journey,
which enables us to tailor experiences
for our customers based on how they
chose to engage with Glossier.What advice would you give to other
marketing pioneers? Discretion
matters just as much as data. As
marketers, we have a vast amount
of quantitative insights that help us
build strategies and measure success,
but it’s easy to over-index on data if
you’re not considering the context and
objective of a project.‘Our customers share
a psychographic,
not a demographic.’
INSIDE THE BRAND
Glossier Boston (top), the brand’s
third temporary retail location
of 2019, boasts an immersive
experience complete with Boston-
exclusive product. The brand’s
original lip gloss now comes in two
new shades based on input from
the Glossier community.ALI WEISS
SVP, MARKETING
GLOSSIER
By Alexa Comeau
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