In this article: Thinking Outside the Box.
The cosmetic industry is constantly evolving and innovating to provide consumers with the best possible experience.
Creating a truly immersive experience for consumers is one of the most exciting aspects of using sensory tools. Engaging consumer’s senses is an effective way to create an experience that sticks with them long after they leave the store. Leading to not only increased sales but also helping to build brand loyalty.
As a marketer, you know that making claims about your product’s superiority over competitors is crucial for success. However, simply making these claims is not enough. You need to be able to prove them. Consumers want to know that they’re investing their money in the best product available.
Product Efficacy and Comparison
Let’s look at the possibilities that get you to reach your goal:
Conduct research: Product testing and competitive analysis is a valuable approach. The information gathered through sensory marketing materials can highlight the benefits of your product.
Compare to competitors: When making claims about your product’s superiority, one can compare it to competitors. Showing just how much better your product is.
Events and demos: Allowing influencers, consumers, and press to use, play with and evaluate the product in action, get proof of claim and ask questions can be done by simplifying or gamifying scale demos. Even creating videos that showcase your product.
Creating specific demos: That support specific claims can be effective. For example, if you’re claiming that your product is more effective than XYZ, then creating a demo that showcases the efficacy is key.
Seek new demo ideas: Work with experts in the industry. External experts can give you a viewpoint that an internal view may not have considered. Someone who has a treasure trove of experience and ideas that can give you proven and science-back innovation to reach your goal. Let them ideate for you.
Use science-based tools: To support campaigns and activations, use science-based tools. This can include influencer campaigns, point-of-sale materials, digital marketing, and e-commerce.
Proof of Product Mildness
Simplification and scalability of demos to support marketing campaigns and activations is key. Science-based tools for influencer campaigns, point-of-sale materials, digital media, and e-commerce are powerful tools to further enhance customer trust and loyalty.
The purpose of ideation is to generate new ideas that demonstrate product claims and show product superiority, to engage and educate audiences of all kinds. Helping build brand and product awareness, generating excitement and making sure they stand out from the rest.
Overall, marketing sensory tools are exciting demo possibilities in the cosmetic industry. By combining physical and digital elements, brands can create a truly immersive experience that engages the consumer’s senses.
USP Phygital Solutions is a leading demo developer of marketing sensory tools for the cosmetic industry. Our tools combine on-skin testing with a guided digital journey to provide a phygital experience that engages consumers with their senses. This deep engagement leads to better diagnosis, higher conversion to purchase, and optimised product recommendations.
As experts in our field, our ideation services have resulted in many highly successful activation tools omnichannel. Check out our brand projects for inspiration.
How to spark new demo ideas in your team
A useful way to actually generate new demo concepts, rather than just talk about wanting them, is to run a short "constraints workshop". Pick one of your hero products and write down five constraints the current demo lives inside, the room, the lighting, the operator, the duration, the materials. Then deliberately break one constraint at a time and ask what the demo would have to look like if that constraint disappeared. Most breakthrough demo formats in the category came from exactly this exercise.
To turn the output into something deployable, pick the two or three ideas that survive a basic "could a consumer reproduce this at home" test, and prototype them with bench materials in the same week. Resist the temptation to brief a polished render before you have held the rough version in your hand, because the rough version is what tells you whether the idea is genuinely new or just a fancier version of what you already had. The cheapest, fastest prototype is almost always the best filter for ideas worth investing in.
It is also worth giving these workshops a regular cadence rather than running them only when a launch is in trouble. A quarterly half-day where the team deliberately revisits one product's demo and asks "what would we do differently if we briefed this today" tends to surface two or three small improvements that compound over the year. Most breakthrough demos in the category did not arrive in a single eureka moment; they were the result of repeated, structured re-examination by teams who refused to let the current version of the demo be the final word.