Salim Azar
Assistant Professor, Isg Business School, France.“I'm Beautiful in My Way”: Exploring Women’s
Identification of Beauty Patterns
The notion that beauty is a multidimensional construct is intuitive.
Yet, most papers published in this field focus on physical attributes of
beauty. To date, beauty imagery remains an underdeveloped construct,
and little is known about its nature and structure. Studying beauty
perception is an important managerial concern because practitioners
use beauty-based marketing strategies to develop and manage their
brands (particularly in cosmetic and beauty field). This research
contributes to the literature with new insights about the nature and
structure of beauty dimensions. Our study moves the conceptualisation
of this construct forward and develops a new scale to measure beauty
perception. For this exploratory phase, we analyse qualitative data from
18 semi-structured interviews and a quantitative data from a
convenience sample of 250 respondents. In both samples we had
women belonging to different ethnic origins and cultures. On the basis
of the quantitative sample, a PCA with Varimax rotation is performed.
This enabled us to show that beauty is a multidimensional construct (a
four-factor structure was explored). Differences were found among
women according to their origins. This classification scheme broadens
the existing beauty literature and its derived taxonomies. The results
provide brand managers with a marketing tool to measure beauty and
allow them to adapt specific marketing strategies.