Summary

• The beauty market is growing and is expected to continue across all categories. 
• To keep up in this increasingly competitive market, beauty brands need to evaluate the market and understand what their competitors are doing and when. 
• Being “market obsessed” regarding beauty industry trends is the best way for brands to stay competitive. 
• AI-driven merchandising experience platforms allow brands to gain access to comprehensive market data and insights through retail competitive analysis. 
• Access to competitor data across trends, visual merchandising, and market analytics allows brands to plan assortments, run promotions, and price items effectively, driving profit and customer satisfaction.

Stay Ahead of Beauty Industry Trends With Access to Competitive Analysis

The beauty industry continues to scale and evolve. In order to keep up, brands cannot simply evaluate their successes; they must regularly look across the market and understand what their competitors are doing via retail competitive analysis (better known as “comp shopping”), and how customers are interacting with key brands in their industry. 

Researchers at Mckinsey & Company highlight that they expect the beauty landscape to, “…become even more competitive, as a range of independent brands that successfully came to market over the past decade seek to scale and as new challengers emerge.”

In this increasingly competitive environment, being “market obsessed” is not only smart, it is essential. Beauty brands must understand and ensure they have a range of assortments, products, and pricing points aligned to their most profitable customer profiles. This is where not only customer data, but also market data, is vital. Understanding how customers interact with competitor brands can equip you with better insights into how and what your customers are most interested in.

The Benefits of Retail Competitive Analysis on Beauty Industry Trends

To gain access to comprehensive market data and insights, leading brands and retailers partner with and use AI-driven merchandising experience platforms like EDITED. Through EDITED’s Market Intelligence tools, retailers can discover fast and accurate insights with the data they need to analyze competitor pricing, discounting, assortment, promotions, and global trends, all in real-time. More effective than manual analysis, this data and time-efficient approach allows retailers to understand what their competitors’ assortments include, what their pricing looks like, and what promotions they are running. As a result, merchandisers and buyers can make better-informed decisions based on data from retail competitive analysis to generate a competitive advantage, resulting in higher revenues and reduced discounting rates.  

With EDITED’s AI-backed data and insights, you gain a competitive advantage through access to trend data, visual merchandising strategies, and market analytics. 

1. Trends and Research: Staying Up to Date With Key Market Trends, Emerging Brands, and Products

Keeping a finger on the pulse of emerging trends is challenging, but it is crucial to success in retail. By utilizing competitor data from EDITED’s merchandising experience platform, you can automate the time consuming process of identifying up-and-coming brands and products through marketplace analysis and trend reports produced by our in-house analysts. These competitive insights aren’t just about keeping up with the Joneses; they’re about finding gaps in the market that you can fill with your unique offerings. By identifying emerging and growing brands/products, you can begin to understand your positioning in the market and potential growth opportunities. 

Retail intelligence platforms can enable brands and retailers to: 

1. Track key product trends driving the market so you can invest in the right ones to appeal to customers. 
2. Monitor new trending ingredients emerging in the market from descriptions of key trending products to ensure your assortment resonates with consumer preferences. For example, identify the next “retinol” product through ingredient search.
3. See customer reviews across competitors to identify which products are highly rated in the market already and gain additional insights to fine-tune your strategies.

2. Visual Merchandising: Planning Perfect Promotions

A well-executed visual merchandising strategy is an excellent way to win market share and drive growth. Competitor data from EDITED provides a window into how players in your market approach promotions, key timings, and marketing themes. You gain access to useful features that allow you to analyze commonly used keywords in publications, websites, blogs, and emails to gain insights into what’s trending and when. This empowers you to tailor your promotional calendar and promotions for maximum impact. Retail intelligence platforms provide you with current and historical data from competitor home pages, landing pages, emails, and promotions so you can: 

1. See all promotional communications from your competitors worldwide such as which value-add offers, like “gift with purchase,” your competition is offering and when. 
2. Unveil key messaging around new beauty industry trends and understand how competitors position their products and promotional activities. 
3. Understand how holidays, products, seasons, and trends are promoted across relevant markets or regions over time. 
4. Launch promotions at the right time, to the right audience, ahead of your competitors.

This data-backed competitive approach ensures that your visual merchandising is aligned with consumer interests and expectations.

3. Market Analytics: Winning at Assortment Planning and Pricing

EDITED’s ​real-time market analytics offer a panoramic view of your competitive landscape. Tracking assortment and pricing activities across various brands and retailers enables you to uncover strategic insights that drive success. Analyzing what other brands or retailers are doing within the beauty sector helps you identify unique whitespace opportunities in the market to accommodate a specific consumer group. 

In terms of assortment planning, EDITED helps you: 

1. Understand localized markets including top performing products and categories across the market, assortments, and promotional activity. 
2. Track the emerging and growing brands you identified through beauty industry trend research to understand your positioning and fill gaps in assortment or replenishment. For example, luxury fragrance sales in the US are increasing as Gen Z revitalizes the category. 
3. Determine what else you might introduce or promote to gain market share and invest in the right products for growth.

For pricing, EDITED’s retail competitive analysis allows you to dissect pricing strategies across competitors and align them with consumer expectations. By leveraging competitor data you can: 

1. Gain clarity on where your prices stand in the market and react swiftly to pricing fluctuations and new entry-priced products. 
2. Shift prices quickly by setting automated analysis to see where your average prices are out of line with competitors. 
3. React proportionately to discounting and improve full-price sell-through by understanding pricing activity across the market.

Conclusion: Retail Competitive Analysis Customized to You

Success in the beauty industry will be defined by those brands and retailers who take the initiative to understand their competitors – those brands who are truly “market obsessed.” This process might seem daunting, but with the help of AI-driven competitive insights, it is much easier to gain strong visibility into your market. By embracing competitor data across trends, visual merchandising, and market analytics, you have the power to understand how or what to promote, and when, as well as how to keep your assortments and pricing aligned to the market.

EDITED’s AI retail competitive analysis provides you with the valuable data and actionable insights you need to take your brand to the next level. Learn more about how EDITED can help your business lead the way in the ever-evolving beauty market here.