Beauty Brands and Customer Loyalty

A PR guru sent me some information I found interesting. Hope you will too!

Brand Keys is a marketing research company that provides its customers with information about customer loyalty; what their customers will be thinking about and buying 18-24 months down the road; and what needs to be fixed, if anything, when customer loyalty starts to slip.

The company recently released its 2010 Customer Loyalty Engagement Index, the result of research that examines customers' relationships with 518 brands in 71 categories, including beauty.

For all 38 brands in the beauty categories tracked in the Brand Keys Index, attributes (factors) related to brand and the degree to which brands affect customer decision making, category-expectations, and "engagement" (loyalty) have increased significantly. "Our 2009 findings predicted that value, not price, was the watchword in consumer behavior. And you can't have the value conversation without the brand conversation, as true brands provide meaningful differentiation in a world overrun by commodities," noted Robert Passikoff, Brand Keys founder and president. He added, "With increased standardization and decreased product differentiation, a real brand can serve up the value consumers expect."

So what did they find in beauty land? These are the brands, among those studied, that received the highest loyalty and "engagement" assessments for 2010.

Luxury Cosmetics

1. Estee Lauder
2. Clinique
3. Chanel
4. Lancome
5. Shisedo

Mass Merchandiser Cosmetics

1. Mary Kay
2. Maybelline
3. L'Oreal
4. CoverGirl
5. Revlon
6. Max Factor
7. Neutrogena
8. Avon
9. Almay
10. Sephora
11. Rimmel
12. Coty

Luxury Moisturizing Skin Care

1. Clinique
2. Estee Lauder
3. Elizabeth Arden
4. Lancome
5. Shiseido
6. Chanel
7. Clarins

Mass Merchandiser Moisturizing Skin Care

1. Mary Kay
2. L'Oreal
3. Aveeno
4. Eucerin
5. Neutrogena
6. Vaseline
7. Garnier
8. Oil of Olay
9. Nivea
10. Ponds

Hair Color

1. Clairol
2. L'Oreal
3. Garnier
4. Revlon

For the Brand Keys 2010 survey, 33,500 consumers, 18 to 65 years of age, drawn from the nine U.S. Census regions, self-selected the categories in which they are consumers and the brands for which they are customers. They were interviewed by phone, face to face (to account for today's 20% of the population who are cell phone-only consumers) and online. If you are interested in the other categories ranked, such as department stores, just visit this link.

So, what do you think? Do these findings represent your preferences? Are you loyal to brands? I sure am! One example: I'll take one of Armani everything, please!

Logos courtesy of the companies listed