Factors driving customer engagement with the global beauty brands via social media marketing

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GOVERNMENT OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION

NATIONAL RESEARCH UNIVERSITY

HIGHER SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS

FACULTY OF WORLD ECONOMY AND INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS

MASTER OF INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS PROGRAM

Master thesis

Topic: “Factors driving customer engagement with the global beauty brands via social media marketing”

Student: Irina Kuznetsova

Research Advisor: Dmitriy S. Khokhlov

Moscow 2018



Table of сontents

Introduction

1. Consumer engagement and brand generated content on social media

1.1 Customer engagement and its peculiarities in virtual communities

1.2 Understanding engagement through social media marketing

1.3 Tools strengthening consumer engagement on social networks

2. Instruments increasing customer engagement with global beauty brands via SMM

2.1 Latest trends in global cosmetics market

2.2 Performance of world make-up brands on their social media pages

2.3 Analysis of international beauty brands content marketing on instagram and facebook

3. Findings and recommendations

Conclusion

References

Appendices



Introduction

In the past few decades, the world faced major technological changes, which affected not only the way how companies operate, but also the way the society communicates. After technologies gained the power to influence all areas of our daily lives, firms started realizing the risks of being out-of-date, hence trying to meet the latest trends and stay as tech-savvy as possible. Just as new digital opportunities show up, modern companies are starting to leverage and adjust them to their current business strategies gaining great profits in return. Due to such emerging technologies as the Internet, gadgetry and social networks, a new way of communication between businesses and consumers has evolved. Nowadays, social media (SM) has got to play a crucial role in the present day society, as the digital part of the business is starting to overcome the traditional one really fast. At present times, the number of companies integrating social media marketing into their current marketing campaigns highly increases, thus boosting brand awareness and brand loyalty.

Today, social media platforms do not only let customers to interact with each other, but they give an opportunity for companies to communicate with their clients. According to Dave Chaffey (2018), the number of social media users worldwide in 2018 reached 3.196 billion, which increased up to 13% since January 2017 https://www.smartinsights.com/social-media-marketing/social-media-strategy/new-global-social-media-research/ and it is predicted to get higher every year. It should be noted, that every global company now has its own profile on at least one social media platform, such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Snapchat etc., which allows brands to keep up with the competition. Social Networks have become a great way to create a brand identity and positive brand association as well as improve communication and interaction with key audiences, enabling brands to reach a big number of people at a low cost.

The truth is that many organizations are struggling with measuring the effect of their social media. As new technological changes extremely improved the internet experience in the past years, the World Wide Web has grown from version 1.0 to Web 2.0., where the latter is built on a more developed technology platform allowing bilateral communication between a brand and a customer. It also appeals to a bigger number of users as they feel empowered to create their own content thus becoming actively engaged in brands social media platforms.

Hoffman et al. (2010) emphasized that since the era of Web 2.0 began, consumer engagement became the new fundamental metrics for measuring SM success, recommending marketers to stop focusing only on short-term results when quite often high engagement may result in delayed sales. She also mentioned that, by measuring engagement consisting of user-generated content, brands are likely to see the holistic picture of consumer actions thus generating their commitment, strengthening brand loyalty and causing the client to endeavor more to support the brand hereinafter. Further studies have also confirmed that measuring online customer engagement is viewed as one of the key success determinants for good social media campaigns (Dessart, 2015; Wirtz et al., 2013). Consumer engagement not only contributes to brand loyalty and word of mouth The process of telling people you know about a particular product or service, usually because you think it is good and want to encourage them to try it (definition proposed by Cambridge Dictionary), but provides brands with useful customer analytics and retention, allowing them to improve their product/service quality.

Global beauty brands are trying to follow the latest trends and reinforce their position on social media platforms not to lag behind the competitors. According to Cosmetics Europe Expert Group (2017) https://www.cosmeticseurope.eu/files/6114/9738/2777/CE_Consumer_Insights_2017.pdf, beauty and personal care products play an essential role in people's daily lives as they tend to pay lots of attention to their health and hygiene and are eager to look good and feel more confident. Technologies are changing the way customers search, buy and even use cosmetics products. Nowadays, the variety of social media and digital platforms indicate that consumers are engaged in producing their own content, spreading it among others and consuming it. In a highly saturated market it is crucial to build strong customer connections boosting their trust and commitment, therefore reducing the competitive risks. As a result, it can be stated that social media has become one of the best marketing tools to engage customers with a brand.

In this day and age, Customer Engagement (CE) has not been investigated thoroughly enough, especially within the confines of Social Media Marketing (SMM). Researchers' opinions diverge on the definition of the term - customer engagement - and there is still no unanimous view on how to measure the online consumer engagement, hence it can be stated that the topic of this paper is of current interest not only for scientific purposes, but for the marketing field as a whole. All businesses that operate on social media platforms are in need of in-depth insights on which instruments they need to use for people to engage more actively on their community pages; the same goes for the beauty industry where online engagement dominates https://www.socialstatus.io/case-studies/beauty-industry-dominating-online-engagement/, so the main goal of this research is to identify which determinants drive the enhancement of consumer engagement on social media platforms with global beauty brands. The object of the study is customer engagement in general, whereas the subject is consumer engagement generated on brands social media platforms.

In order to achieve the main aim of the paper the following tasks are set:

- To review existing literature on the topic: the definition and the concept of the term “Customer Engagement” and its peculiarities in SMM together with factors influencing the online consumer engagement in the global beauty industry;

- To analyze the performance of some of the most popular world cosmetic brands on social media platforms through online desk research to identify their consumer engagement rate;

- To conduct cross-case analysis by monitoring content marketing of the chosen beauty brands and comparing their SMM strategies;

- To make recommendations for global beauty brands with respect to enhancement of CE on their brand community pages.



1. Consumer engagement and brand generated content on social media

1.1 Customer engagement and its peculiarities in virtual communities

Social media platforms have grown into an essential instrument for companies in creating solid interrelations with its users paying special attention to customer engagement (CE). Today, social networking sites (SNS) allow users to interact with brands directly thereby getting them involved and engaged.

Notwithstanding that the notion `engagement' has been applied in various academic spheres such as organizational behavior, psychology, social science, education, marketing scholars started using only recently. According to Brodie et al. (2011), the concept of engagement has been drawing attention of different businesses since 2005, and has been of great interest to academic scholars which brought to appearance of varied approaches to this concept.

According to Patterson et al. (2006), customer engagement is “the level of a customer's physical, cognitive and emotional presence in their relationship with a service organization.” Van Doorn et al. (2010) viewed customer engagement as a unidimensional concept defining it as a customer's behavior towards a firm or a brand, which can be expressed in the form of word-of-mouth activities, recommendations to other consumers, writing reviews, leading blogs and helping the rest of the clients with choosing a product.

As reported by Hollebeek (2011, p.6), customer engagement is considered to be a multidimensional concept and described as “the level of a customer's motivational, brand-related and context-dependent state of mind characterized by specific levels of cognitive, emotional and behavioral activity in brand interactions”.

As the World Wide Web has grown from version 1.0 to Web 2.0, new definitions of customer engagement started to appear within this context. Notably, the concept of online customer engagement became an interesting topic for researchers, as social networking sites gave brands an opportunity to enhance the relationships with their clients by communicating with them directly on brand social media platforms.

One of the first scholars who investigated online consumer engagement were Mollen and Wilson (2010, p.5), who determined is as “the customer's cognitive and affective commitment to an active relationship with the brand as personified by the website or other computer-mediated entities designed to communicate brand value.” The authors also emphasize that CE is different from the concept of “involvement” suggesting that it goes beyond that term as engaged consumers are considered to participate in an interactive dialogue with a particular engagement object (i.e. a firm or a brand).

Customer or Consumer engagement is considered to be an important element from the customer management perspective not only in stores offline, but also online, notably, on networked societies (Verhoef, Reinartz & Kraft, 2010). Another study made on the customer engagement within the scope of online environment states that consumer engagement is a level of a consumers' emotional, physical and cognitive presence on a particular online social network (Cheung et al, 2011, p.3). The authors also distinguish three dimensions of CE which are include dedication (an emotional dimension expressed in passion, enthusiasm and energy a customer is feeling on a brand social media), vigor (a physical dimension expressed in a customer's desire to spend time on a brands social platform) and absorption (a cognitive dimension expressed in a customer's level of concentration on a brand social network).

Following the previous studies on the topic, Brodie et al. (2011, p. 107) derived his own definition of the customer engagement within virtual brand communities and described it as “a multidimensional concept comprising cognitive, emotional, and or behavioral dimensions”. In that very paper, he conducts a research analyzing previous literature on this subject together with various blog posts deriving, as a result, a dynamic conceptual model of customer engagement process within online social media platforms (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Consumer engagement process in a virtual brand community

Source: R. Brodie et al, Consumer engagement in a virtual brand community: An exploratory analysis, (2011), p.6

Firstly, the process begins with different triggers which motivate a person to join a brand social network, for instance, a wish to decrease the amount of time and money spent on searching for an appropriate product or service or just a lack of necessary information on a brand offerings or a desire to check if the existing information about a brand products is credible enough.

Later on the author identifies five particular customer engagement sub-processes which include: marketing customer engagement

· Learning - a stage when a consumer is just starting to getting to know the brand searching through its online community;

· Sharing - a process of sharing relevant information and experience connected with the brand products or services among users of its online community;

· Advocating - implying consumers' active recommendations of a brand products or services to other users of its online community;

· Socializing - a process of bilateral communication among a brand community users, which unites them on the basis of the brand products or services;

· Co-developing - a process of the highly engaged users' participation in the performance of a brand community, which may include the development of new products, brand-related ideas, recruitment of new joiners etc.

All of the previously mentioned engagement sub-processes may lead to the following outcomes for the brand: established connections & emotional bonding, brand loyalty and satisfaction, commitment and trust to the brand and, finally, consumers feeling of empowerment.

After all, customer engagement process might contain a so-called “dormancy” and/or “termination” state at a certain time period, where “dormancy” means a short-term condition of passive and idle engagement by brand online users who have been actively engaged with a brand before; whereas “termination” introduces a state of a continuous disengagement (Brodie et al, 2011, p. 110).

In 2015 Dessart et al. propose their own framework of online brand engagement. They distinguish three core categories of customer engagement in online brand communities: behavioral, affective and cognitive types of engagement which subsequently divide into seven sub-dimensions that include enthusiasm, enjoyment, attention, absorption, sharing, learning and endorsing (Table 1). The antecedents of these engagements might involve brand-related (brand trust, identification and satisfaction), social (online brand community identification) and community value drivers which include such motives as a desire of entertainment, information and monetary incentives.

According to Dessart (2015), the process of customer engagement with a brand online community finishes with the increased brand loyalty. To achieve this brand loyalty within social media platforms, the brand representatives may pay particular attention to consumers leaving negative comments on the brand page, for instance, offering them some free services, or just by positively communicating with the consumers which might then convert those customers to the committed clients who would defend the brand from negative comments of other users.



Table 1: Dimensions and sub-dimensions of customer engagement

Source: Dessart, Consumer engagement in online brand communities: a social media perspective (2015, p. 35)

The creation of COBRA framework also contributed to the investigation of customer engagement within the scope of online environment. Originally it was proposed by Shao (2009), who analyzed the limits to which customers interact with user-generated media (UGM), who derived three modes of engagement: consumption, participation and creation of brand-related media.

The concept was later explored in a research made by Muntinga et al. in 2011, who proposed to define three engagement dimensions: consumption, contribution and creation. Later on, Schivinski et al. (2016) gave a definition to COBRA concept describing it as “a set of brand-related online activities on the part of the consumer that vary in the degree to which the consumer interacts with social media and engages in the consumption, contribution, and creation of media content”

The most common type of COBRA is considered to be the consumption of brand content which implies no communication on the brand social media platforms such as watching a brand video or reading its post. A not so common, but also widely used COBRA type - “contribution” - means that users do not just observe the brand related content, but also interact with it by “liking” or commenting a brand post, for instance. And finally, the type which implies the highest level of users' online activities indicates that consumers generate their own content which relates to the brand in its virtual communities.

A more detailed and elaborated classification of customer engagement typology was introduced by Mark Ghuneim (2010) which can be observed in Table 2. According to the classification, customer engagement framework consists of four stages which display different levels of consumer engagement towards a brand.

The lowest degree of engagement is introduced by adopters who do not actively participate on brand pages and who prefer to just join a community or bookmark a page. The medium degree of engagement is represented by collaborative users, who tend to moderately take part in the life of brand communities by commenting the brand posts, favoriting them and participating in brand voting pools.

Highly engaged users are considered to be those who contribute to a brand page content a lot by creating ad publishing brand related posts and actively communicating with other users. And lastly, there is the highest level; of engaged consumers which include users who attract their friends to a brand page and develop their own fan communities.



Table 2: The classification of consumer engagement type

Source: Mark Ghuneim, Terms of Engagement Measuring the Active Consumer ( 2010)

In conclusion, it should be stated that online customer engagement has been investigated by plenty of scholars, but businesses do not have to forget that consumer engagement is also created through offline client experience by, for instance, making telephone calls to consumers to remind them of the brand or by installation of in-store digital technologies, which help customers to navigate through the brand products and services.

1.2 Understanding engagement through social media marketing

Even though social media is about new appearance in the communication field, large researchers and authors have made their investment to conceptualization of social media and disassembled its out-and-outer features and features (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2009; Dutta, 2009; Hoffman, 2004; Jones, 2009). As advances to the determination can vary from one article to another, all authors assure that social media is dynamically receiving impulse in its development. In addition, social networking has brought in drastic changes in the way how peoples interact between each other and how brands communicate with their aim audience.

Now clients have an approach by the Internet to any data about brands, their output and experience. Across social media networking they can divide their beliefs through comments about quality of business ` production and services, cooperate with other consumers that have effective influence on brand understanding and consumer solution-making act (Mangold and Faulds, 2009). Hoffman states that “the Internet makes available many intelligence origins that consumers can attract on as they search for info and build up selections about commercial proposals. These data originы involve social media sites, online creation critique (either by peers or specialists), and uncensored meticulous product facts on a diversity of Websites, amongst a lot of other sources” (Hoffman, 2004, p. 530).

Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein (2012) determine social media as "a group of Internet- based applications that build on the ideologic and technologic foundations of Web 2.0, which let the creation and interchange of user- produced content." (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2012, p. 101). Due to the authors, social media includes social networks (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Linkedln), blogs, content communities (i.e. YouTube), collaborative projects (i.e. Wikipedia) and online game worlds (i.e. Linage 2, World of Warcraft).

Dutta (2010) backings this concept in his research, debating that “social media-global, open, clear, non-hierarchical, interactive, and real time- is changing user conduct and workplace waiting.” (Dutta, 2010, p. 128).

Nowadays it has get more and more complex to keep loyal to the conventional means of communication while humanity actively use social media in dealing with each other. This affirmation without doubt can be also reflected to business relations. Across dynamic evolution and propagation of the Internet, consumers receive an access to nearly unbounded quantity of data that substantially changes the approach in constructing communication between customers and business.

Jones (2009) epitomize mentioning that social media is a kind of online media where society are talking, cooperating, sharing, networking, and bookmarking online. Kietzmann et al. (2011) in their analysis case that social media covers web-based technologies to establish bilateral platforms which afford users and communities with freedom to share, modify, debate and co-create user-generated content (Kietzmann et al., 2011).

Social networks have in principle modernized the way users interact with each other. Clients don't` use today social media only for data research, but for involving with brands openly speak their views (Garretson, 2008). Social media affords to clients and brands a space to build a new format of online mutual connections where each side can growth profits. Firms get uncommon device through social media expedite firstly the ways of comprehension their clients' wishes and approaches and secondly expanse target audience. Furthermore, the dialogs between users grant in cost impressive way to boost brand recognition, gain brand allegiance and recognition (Gunelius, 2015).

Today social media combines dozens of different contents that can be divided into 10 broad categories (Table 3):



Table 3

Source: URL: https://blog.hootsuite.com/types-of-social-media/

Metrics of online CE

According to J. Davis (2016), there are four forms of social media engagement https://unionmetrics.com/blog/2016/03/types-of-social-media-engagement/ which vary in terms of the content published by brands on online platforms:

1) ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Acknowledgment engagement implies a simple reaction to brand content and includes “reactions”, “favorites” and “likes”, which mean that a post was noticed and somehow appreciated.

Like buttons represent the amount of people who liked a certain post. The feature was firstly introduced by Facebook on February 9, 2009. But on February 24, 2016 Facebook replaced “Likes” with "Reactions" worldwide enabling users to choose among different emotions ranging from "Love", "Haha", "Wow", "Sad", and "Angry”.

2) ASSOCIATION

Association engagement embodies users interaction with published content and it might be presented in the forms of “Comments”, “Follows”, “Replies”, “Mentions”. When users respond to a post, they are directly showing to other users that they associate themselves with the brand.

This kind of engagement is considered to be of a higher quality because it requires more commitment and effort from a person in comparison with a simple “Like”. Such type of engagement is highly valuable, as it can show clients feedback to a brand service or product.

3) AMPLIFICATION

Amplification engagement means that users spread some information on a brand among each other. It is represented in “Retweets”, “Shares”, “Reblogs”. This is a very valuable form of social media engagement as it implies that a user adds a piece of content of a brand to his/her personal page, thus allowing the brand to enlarge their social reach and present their content to a new audience.

4) ACTION

Action engagement includes “Clicks” to a brand website. This type is harder to measure for marketers, but is of great engagement quality for them as it allows businesses to make their audience go to another platform where they might do something of higher value, such as buying a brand product or just subscribing to the brand newsletter.

In our research paper we are going to use only the first three types of engagement, as the action CE can't be measured without additional marketing tools to which only the brands themselves have access to.

Each social media platform uses its own methods of calculating customer engagement. The most popular ones will be introduced below.

Engagement rate calculations

There are numerous approaches to the calculation of customer engagement rate, which demonstrated how well the audience interacts with the provided content. Engagement rate is specific for each online platform. Below are provided formulas for the most popular social media sites such as Facebook and Instagram.

1) Engagement rate on Facebook is calculated as the sum of Comments, Reactions and Shares reached by a post divided into the total number of followers at the given time and multiplied by 100 to get the final % of brand/post engagement:

2) Instagram provides a similar equation, taking into consideration the sum of Comments and Likes on a particular post divided into the total number of followers and multiplied by 100:

In addition, one of the major global social media analytics companies, SocialBakers, suggests applying a bit different type of CE metrics which is Number of Interactions per 1000 fans https://cdn.socialbakers.com/www/storage/microsites/userguides/Glossary_v_2.pdf. This formula is considered to be quite advanced as it takes into consideration the size of the page. The equation with the number of total interactions (likes/reactions, comment and shares) divided by the number of followers on the time the post is published multiplied by 1000 is presented below:

All in all, in the second chapter of the current master's thesis, where the customer engagement with global beauty brands on social media will be analyzed, the following metrics will be used:

1. Total Followers - The total number of fans following a brand page presented on the final day of the chosen time period.

2. Growth of Total Followers - The number to which the sum of a brand page fans increased or decreased during the chosen time range.

3. Number of Profile Posts - The total amount of posts published on a brand page during the selected time period.

4. Number of Interactions - The amount of Interactions (shares, comments, reactions and likes) a brand page receives during a particular time range.

5. Number of Interactions per 1000 followers.

1.3 Tools Strengthening Consumer Engagement on Social Networks

To drive online customer engagement businesses should focus on their content marketing strategies which include various components that are going to be described in the following chapter.

The analysis of the previous studies made on the topic allowed us to distinguish the following factors, influencing customer engagement on social media:

Post Content type

According to Vries et al. (2015), the type of post content a brand is going to publish massively influences the engagement and the number of interactions brought by social media users. The authors suggest that informative and entertaining kinds of post drive the highest level of consumer engagement.

Nevertheless, it should be noticed that entertaining content is infrequently used by global cosmetics brands, thus it will be excluded from our analysis. Bakhshi et al. (2014) explored the customer engagement on Instagram and found out that posts including faces accumulated a higher engagement level on users posts. We believe that this factor may apply to Facebook as well, so this type of content will be analyzed as one the factors driving online customer engagement. Within the cosmetics industry, “posts with faces” might be expressed by photos of models wearing a brand make-up or in the form of close-up pictures/videos of someone's face or even its particular parts wearing a brand makeup.

One more kind of content which is going to be investigated will be images/videos with brand products. According to Phua et al. (2017) social media users engage more with brand material such as brand products on Instagram compared to other social media platforms such as Facebook and Snapchat. This type of content will fit for the beauty industry as cosmetic brands tend to post lots of information on their focal products or new launches.

In addition, one more content subtype will be considered in the current analysis, which is content that comprises both faces and brand products, as it is used quite often on make-up social networks.

Post media type

Post media type is described by Cvijkj & Michahelles (2013) as sharing of a post made by a brand page moderator. Facebook allows publishing text posts, images, videos and links, whereas Instagram does not let users to publish just a text or a link alone, as they should always be provided with either an image or a video or both of them together. Each of the media types has a different level of media richness that is supposed to be the vividness of the published content.

According to Brookes (2010), posts with images drive much more customer engagement than posts including videos and even higher level of engagement than posts with plain texts. Previous researchers have shown that the degree of post vividness plays a crucial part when generating customer engagement.

As the further analysis will be conducted within two media platforms - Facebook and Instagram - some boundaries should be set for the social networks: beauty posts published on Facebook pages will be considered in terms of three media subtypes - images, videos and links, while Instagram pages will be limited only to images and videos.

Posting day

Every day social media users get more and more bombarded with various brand publications on different social networks. As a result, it is crucially important for brands to publish their posts at the proper time for the publications to get noticed by users (Kumar, 2006). Therefore, posting time should be considered as an important factor for enhancing customer engagement when make up a content marketing strategy. Golder et al. (2006) point out that most of the content is usually published on weekdays, therefore generating the higher level of customer engagement unlike weekends when users are usually socially passive.

Influencer integration

According to Mangold and Faulds (2009), consumers tend to trust information published on social media platforms better than the one which originates from traditional word-of-mouth like radio, television or newspapers. As a result, lots of beauty brands start collaborating massively with various social media influencers to attract more clients to the brand.

A social media influencer is an individual who has an impact on a brand page users and consumers within the brand social network sites and influences their opinions towards the brand services or products (Freberg et al., 2011). Concerning the beauty brands practice, the collaboration with an influencer implies that the latter get the brand beauty products and post them on their social media platforms, usually providing some recommendations. The integration of an influencer into brand social media posts enables them to reach a wider number of people, not only because of the large amount of followers on their personal pages but also because people consider influencers to be more trustworthy in comparison with other traditional types of advertisements.

Interactivity Level

De Vries et al. (2012) designed a framework for measuring brand post popularity (customer engagement) on Facebook brand posts. The model included possible factors for brand post popularity, measured via likes and comments. Apart from already mentioned factors such as “vividness”, “informational content” and “entertaining content”, they analyzed one more tool which was named “interactivity” which implies voting pools, questions the audience, contests and various calls to actions like requests to but a brand products formulated somewhat in an imperative mood. De Vries et al. (2012) suggested measuring the level of interactivity factor from low to high where low interactivity referred to posts that only included a simple text, and high interactivity referred to posts that comprised of a question, a quiz, a contest and other interactive actions.

As a result, based on the previous studies, the following factors influencing customer engagement are proposed for the further analysis of beauty pages:

Table 4 - Tools affecting customer engagement with make-up brands on their social networks

Factors	Variable sub-factors
Post Media Type	- Images - Videos - Links (applicable for Facebook)
Post Content Type	- Images/videos with Brand Products - Images/videos with Faces - Images/videos with both Brand Products and Faces
Interactivity	- High Level of Interactivity - Low Level of Interactivity
Posting Day	- Publishing on Workdays - Publishing on Weekends
Influencer Integration	- Present Influencer Integration - Absent Influencer Integration

Source: Composed by the author on the basis of previous studies written on the topic



2. Instruments increasing customer engagement with global beauty brands via SMM

2.1 Latest trends in global cosmetics market

Lately, there has been noticed a substantial increase in disposable incomes over the last decades. Global economies have been generally growing; people's lifestyles have been changing, demands for skin care products have been rising owing to different climate conditions - all these factors stimulate the growth of the beauty industry.

Although the global financial crisis took place a while ago and retarded the market growth, only increasing the demand for inexpensive cosmetics products, in recent times Millennials became a huge driver of the beauty market. It should be stated that customers' preferences shifted towards organic, herbal and natural cosmetics products, thus creating potential opportunities for global beauty manufacturers to create new and innovative products which only allows to wider the makeup market by attracting new customers.

According to Euromonitor International (2017), beauty and personal care industry grew by 5% in 2016. Two years in a row, the mass market segment was outperformed by the premium one with approximately 6% growth. https://blog.euromonitor.com/2017/05/reimagining-growth-in-the-global-beauty-industry.html

As for the product categories, color cosmetics showed a consistent growth: it increased by 7.2% in 2016 with the previous rise by 6% in 2015. What have been driving the category growth are dynamic brands, such as NYX, Urban Decay and Too Faced, which leverage digital and social media platforms to communicate and interact with their customers, thus strengthening the consumer experience. As far as the skin care category concerns, it slightly decreased to fewer than 5%, mainly due to the general slowdown in China. Two other main categories, hair care and fragrances, demonstrated a more solid growth in 2016 in comparison with 2015, whereas such categories as deodorants and bath & shower kept being more or less stable.

Regarding the Euromonitor International's forecasts, the premium beauty segment is going to grow with a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 3.6% in 2016-2021, while mass cosmetics is believed to increase only by 2.4%.

The reason for such discrepancy would be the fact that premium beauty brands generate greater value than the mass segment. Business analytics expect premium color cosmetics to increase globally by 4.2% over the same period, which could potentially lead to the total category outperformance and it taking the second place after the skin care segment.

Despite the strength of mass color cosmetics in the market, lately, the premiumisation trend has been activated, as more and more customers look for products with a higher quality, which premium brands stand for. Consumers tend to lead a healthier lifestyle, buying organic and ecologically clean products. Nowadays, people start to consume less, preferring new experiences to new possessions and being more skeptical about brand products. As the level of life increases, especially in the U.S and Europe, consumers would rather invest in more expensive but of higher quality premium brands than spend their income on mass market which does not fully meet their needs. As a result, customized beauty products and personalized services come into place, which are usually supported by new smart technologies that brands try to use to keep up with the times.

Overall, it is true to say that premiumisation is changing standards throughout all the levels of the cosmetics industry. Moreover, it is crucial for businesses to understand that due to the extending growth of Internet users, consumers have more access to different kinds of knowledge and information, thus it is easier for them to distinguish any marketing tricks from the true scientific research. All the more so, brands have to remember how important it is right now to leverage various digital technologies until they become mainstream.



2.2 Performance of world make-up brands on their social media pages

Three global make-up beauty brands within the colour cosmetics industry will be scrutinized in this research paper: premium M.A.C Cosmetics, Too Faced and NYX Professional Makeup which belongs to mass beauty segment. These brands belong to the top five leading make-up brands on Instagram (Leading beauty brands ranked by number of Instagram followers as of December 2017, 2017 https://www.statista.com/statistics/536991/leading-beauty-brands-instagram-followers/). Sephora was not taken into consideration since it is a chain of cosmetic stores which sells lots of make-up brands products. The chosen brands were also included in the top 10 Beauty Brands with the highest Digital index in 2017 (Gartner L2, 2017). https://www.l2inc.com/daily-insights/top-10-beauty-brands-in-digital-3 The key social media platforms that global cosmetics brands leverage today are Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and Instagram. It should be mentioned that according to statistics (SmartInsights, 2017) https://www.smartinsights.com/social-media-marketing/social-media-strategy/new-global-social-media-research/, Facebook is considered to be the most popular social network based on the share of time users spend on SNS and the number of active users (2 167 million users in comparison with 800 million users on Instagram). Moreover, Facebook is believed to be the fastest-growing social network as the number of its active users increased to the point of 527 million people in two years (2015 - 2017). Nevertheless, Instagram doesn't lag far behind with 400 million of increased active users during the same period, so it will be true to say that Instagram is a fast growing social media platform as well. Moreover, it has the highest customer engagement level in comparison with other social networks. According to a 2016 Forrester report, Instagram had the highest per-follower interaction rate, which is 2.2 percent https://blog.hootsuite.com/instagram-statistics/, whereas other social networks indicators seemed to be lower, for example Facebook had only 0.22 percent interaction rate. Altogether, Facebook and Instagram are considered to be one of best platforms for brands to promote their products or services and directly communicate with target audience, especially within the global beauty industry, thus we can note that we are going to use these social networks when conducting our analysis on beauty brands online customer engagement, as they seem to be the most relevant.

All the three brands under analysis have a common well-designed content marketing strategy on social media, although all of them have got different brand identities. Their Instagram and Facebook pages prove to be outstanding in terms of customer engagement enhancement: the beauty brands tend to publish posts with images or videos containing either brand products, or faces, or faces together with the products; in addition, they try to integrate more influencers into their social media platforms. A more detailed description of the scrutinized brands will be introduced below.

M.A.C

Make-up Art Cosmetics (M.A.C) was founded by the make-up artist and photographer, Frank Tosken and the beauty salon owner, Frank Angelo in Toronto (Canada) in 1984. They found out that the existing color cosmetic products did not fit well for the photography shootings, thus they decided to develop different makeup products using more colors which could met their professional needs. At first they targeted only makeup artists, photographers and models, but the popularity of the brand grew so fast that their audience started expanding to models' and photographers' friends and family and eventually covered a wide number of consumers without references to any job occupation. In other words, M.A.C stopped being associated as professional makeup for professionals and became professional makeup for everyone.

In 1998, M.A.C. was acquired by The Estйe Lauder Companies, one of the leading manufacturers of premium beauty products in the world, which led to the brand's global distribution. Currently, M.A.C aims to provide quality cosmetics, based on the demand of professional makeup artists, including launching of new categories of makeup that could fit different types of consumers and would allow them to express their individuality.

As for the brand social media presence, it could be stated that M.A.C uses many different kinds of social media platforms; the highly used ones are to be Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. trying to integrate them with the brand website. Notwithstanding the SM channels different purposes and environments, M.A.C tries to keep its content consistent, using social media marketing to increase the website traffic and conversions, to enhance brand awareness and create a positive brand association by communicating and interacting with its audience.

Concerning the brand content marketing, M.A.C keeps publishing professional makeup images, videos and tutorials on a daily basis. The high social media engagement of the brand is supposed to be driven by posts with images of the upcoming products that are going to be launched soon, and collaborations with professional makeup artists, which create anticipation among the brand followers. Besides, the photos of M.A.C products tend to be very colorful and appealing to the eye which makes them stand out in users' newsfeeds.

NYX

NYX Professional Makeup was named after the Greek goddess of night and founded by Toni Ko in 1999 in Los Angeles, USA. Initially catering to beginner make-up artists who wished to buy professional makeup products at affordable prices, the brand was sold to L'Orйal, a leading international cosmetics company, in 2015 and subsequently extended its business all over the globe, as its mass market division.

Nowadays, this global beauty brand is available in over 70 countries at thousands of retailers, and considered to be one of the most digitally and socially savvy makeup brands in the world. The brand aims to provide consumers with high quality products at accessible prices, allowing clients to enhance their makeup artistry to a higher level. NYX focuses on diversity, offering plenty of colors, shades and makeup tools thus trying to fulfill everyone's need.

NYX is famous for reshaping the traditional customer journey and creating a real multi-channel experience by integrating social media into a conventional retail format. In 2016 the brand opened plenty of so-called digital stores with special built-in screens and scanners with the help of which customers could connect with NYX social media platforms. By scanning a product, clients can get all the necessary details about it provided not only by the brand (e.g. basic description, How-Tos etc.), but also user-generated content (UGC), that includes information on how previous customers used it that is their experience and tips. In addition, each NYX product has its own hashtag, which can be searched for by customers on social networks to get to know the item better, at the same time encouraging them to also share a photo using the same hashtag and expressing their own opinion on the product. These features help NYX to engage clients with the brand and increase their loyalty.

According to Tribe Dynamics report (2018), NYX ranks among the top five brands with the highest earned media value on almost all social media channels.

Too Faced

Too Faced Cosmetics was founded in 1998 by Jeremy Johnson and Jerrod Blandino, who previously had worked as Estee Lauder makeup artists. Both founders believed the makeup products at that moment were too classic and standard, thus they decided to create their own cosmetics which could bring back femininity and glamour to the beauty industry. The main sources of inspiration for them would be love for Paris, womanliness and the transformative power of cosmetics. Their concept would be to develop a makeup line that celebrates women allowing them to express their individuality and boosting their confidence.

Creating innovative and cruelty-free makeup products let Too Faced become one of the leading brands in the beauty industry. In 2016, it was purchased by The Estйe Lauder Companies, which results now in the fact that the brand is considered to be top-selling within color cosmetics market and is sold in over than 30 countries.

As for now, Too Faced has grown into a quite prosperous beauty brand which effectively uses digital and social marketing creating a strong and positive brand image. To successfully target their young audience (mainly consisting of Millennials), Too Faced promotes its products through different social media platforms, namely Instagram, Facebook and Youtube, which allows it to increase brand awareness. The Too Faced website also provides a similar to NYX web page feature, which implies that customers can look through Instagram pictures of other clients wearing Too Faced makeup and upload their own right away. Finally, when designing new products Too Faced is prone to collaborating with various influencers as it helps the brand to create more buzz around the newly launched collections and inclining more people to buy them.

The analysis of key performance indicators of the leading global beauty brands on social media

The current research paper not only focuses on the brands social media strategies but compares major KPIs of M.A.C, NYX and Too Faced cosmetics brands on such social media platforms as Facebook and Instagram. The data for the analysis was researched from 01st March 2018 to 31st March 2018 with the help of Socialbackers Analytics.

Facebook

Table 5: The Total Number of a Page's Followers

Brand	Number of Total Fans
M.A.C	13 858 810
Too Faced	2 993 368
NYX	2 020 062

Source: Chart created using the data from Socialbakers Analytics,

URL: https://suite.socialbakers.com/274788/analytics/fb/multicompare

M.A.C Cosmetics has over 3 times more followers than Too Faced attracting 13,8 million users from all over the world and over 6 times more fans than NYX Cosmetics which could get a bit more than 2 million people on its page.

As for the absolute growth of total followers, M.A.C again stays on top with 73 997 people. Too Faced doesn't lag much behind, the page's number of fans increased to 68 607 people. Then comes NYX with somewhat lower results - 20 467 users.

Diagram 1 - Absolute Growth of Total Followers on Each Page

Source: Chart created using the data from Socialbakers Analytics,

URL: https://suite.socialbakers.com/274788/analytics/fb/multicompa

Content overview

During the month M.A.C has published 177 posts on its Facebook page, while Too Faced and NYX were characterized as not so active profiles which published 73 and 47 posts respectively.

Diagram 2 - Number of All Posts Published By Each Page

Source: Chart created using the data from Socialbakers Analytics,

URL: https://suite.socialbakers.com/274788/analytics/fb/multicompare

Engagement overview

Too Faced ranks first by Number of interactions per 1000 followers - 190,01; although its number of fans and posts is pretty similar to NYX, when NYX and M.A.C are far behind it with 16,15 and 11,11 respectively.

Diagram 3 - Number of Interactions per 1000 Followers Per Page

Source: Chart created using the data from Socialbakers Analytics,

URL: https://suite.socialbakers.com/274788/analytics/fb/multicompare

Despite the fact that Too Faced Facebook Page has a fewer number of fans in comparison with M.A.C, it managed to achieve the highest number of interactions, 321 550, consisting of 304 327 Reactions, 10 430 Comments and 6 793 Shares. The second place goes to M.A.C, where number of Shares prevails over the number of Comments: 4 134 over 3 279. But Reactions still exceed the other two forms of interactions, and reach up to 146 002, making 153 415 interactions total. NYX ranks third with total 32 491 of interactions, consisting of 29 811 Reactions, 1 564 Comments and 1 116 Shares.

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