Shiseido: Predicting Intent, Driving Beauty Growth

In Think with Google,  predicting future behavior.

How one beauty brand is predicting intent to drive growth

Alessio Rossi, global chief digital officer at Shiseido, says that to truly grow, brands must stop reacting to customer intent and start anticipating it.

Beauty shoppers today are passionate and curious. They spend hours researching product benefits and reading reviews before deciding what to buy. Even product aspects that were once low consideration, such as ingredients, now generate hours of research time.

Given how research-obsessed people are, we, as marketers, can’t afford to just react to in-the-moment behaviors. That would leave us one step behind. We have to anticipate what people might need and deliver it to them in meaningful ways.

At Shiseido, we’ve built our business around anticipating our customers’ needs, because it’s the best way to deliver strong results. Here’s what we’ve learned along the way  . .... 

We realized that we also needed to predict what other kinds of products might excite them. People can’t tell you exactly what they might want next, so we take cues from past actions to predict future intentions. We call it showing people “the right amount of wrong.” We may not always get it right, but we will continue to learn and provide value as we nurture these relationships.

Give value to get value

Our customers are willing to provide information about their preferences because we give them value in return. And the more information we have about our customers, the better we can infer their needs. As soon as we stop providing that value, we lose their trust. So we take this relationship seriously.  ... "