Wiki: Meet Jennifer - Strategy Exec Fortune 500

Consumer Data, (De)Coded.

Meet Jennifer - Strategy Exec Fortune 500

Consider Jennifer, a strategy executive at a Fortune 500 beauty brand who likes to make decisions backed by convincing data. Currently she is tasked with vetting marketing strategies to promote a new vegan skin care product.

Data shows that veganism is becoming more popular amongst the typical demographic of her brand, but motivations are unclear. Jennifer knows that as far as Food and Beverage goes, veganism is seen as a great way to support animal rights by curbing exploitation and cruelty. With this in mind, Jennifer boots up the Social Standards tool, chooses Beauty as the desired market vertical, and navigates to the vegan object in Market Insights to find out what consumers associate with it.

By generating a graph (see Vegan Conversations in Beauty, below), Jennifer uncovers an interesting insight: although cruelty free is still the foremost topic when it comes to vegan conversations, indicated by its right-most positioning, the fact that it is shaded red and low on the Y-axis means its share of conversation has slightly decreased over time. This likely means that consumers now take for granted the association between vegan products and their claims of being cruelty free.

On the other hand, self care is both dark green and very high on the Y-axis, meaning its share of conversation has significantly increased over time and is coming close to the amount cruelty free gets mentioned. Relevant also are the positions of natural formulations and acne, for they indicate that consumers increasingly worry about the purity of products they put on their skin.

Vegan Conversations in Beauty

X-axis	Raw Penetration	How frequently is [x] mentioned in vegan conversations in Beauty?
Y-axis	Penetration Percentile - rel chng 12 mn	How has [x] representation in vegan conversations relative to the average topic in Beauty changed over 12 months? (1x = norm)
Circle Shading	Raw Penetration - rel chng 3 mn	How much has the frequency [x] is mentioned in vegan conversations in Beauty changed over 3 months?
Circle Size	Topic Prominence	How often is [x] mentioned within vegan conversations in Beauty?

To double-check these insights, Jennifer pulls up the skincare product type and graphs its relational data (see Skincare Conversations in Beauty, below). Once again, self care ranks very high in relation to other topics, its growth outpacing all others. This points to how skincare and self care are increasingly viewed as synonymous by consumers. What is really interesting about this graph is the positioning of organic, cruelty free, and natural formulations: they have all experienced a slight reduction in their mentions within skincare conversations. This pattern mirrors the results from Vegan Conversations in Beauty and confirms that consumers of skincare products are talking more about self care and are less concerned with how they are formulated, which now seems to be a given.

Skincare Conversations in Beauty

X-axis	Penetration Percentile	How often do skincare conversations in Beauty mention [x]?
Y-axis	Raw Penetration - rel chng 12 mn	How much has the frequency [x] is mentioned in skincare conversations in Beauty changed over 12 months? (1x = norm)
Circle Shading	Raw Penetration - rel chng 3 mn	How much has the frequency [x] is mentioned in skincare conversations in Beauty changed over 3 months?
Circle Size	Topic Prominence	How often is [x] mentioned within skincare conversations in Beauty?

Overall, consumers of skincare products can be said to be quite aware of the implications of vegan products and that they are increasingly concerned about tending to themselves with clean products. As such, Jennifer decided to go with a campaign that emphasized self care over the formulation of the product.

Thankfully, this angle seemed to resonate with consumers and the new product sold well. To follow up, Jennifer used Social Standards to check up on conversations surrounding the product a month after release, and found that those who value self care indeed appreciate the vegan quality of the product.