How NYX Cosmetics Stands Out in a Sea of Sameness

NYX Cosmetics is likely one of the only large beauty brands to eschew professional models in favor of authentic consumers to showcase its products. NYX is the embodiment of a brand that stands out in a sea of sameness; it is at the leading edge of leveraging user-generated content (UGC) and in-store technology to thoroughly engage with and become completely relatable to its customers.

Like all cosmetics brands, NYX (pronounced “nix”), a mass market division of beauty giant L’Oreal, faces a challenge selling online: that is, buyers want to try on, or at least examine in person, colors and textures. How else can they determine how a product will look on their unique skin tone?

Here’s how NYX helps solve that problem - it activates its army of extraordinarily loyal customers – 7.7 million Instagram followers – and its vast library of professional-looking customer selfies.

“All the images for our campaigns feature real people, including the top fold of our home page,” says Bernice Merlini, eCommerce Marketing Manager. “They are relatable. These influencers look like you and me.”

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“If we know a shopper loves a bold look we can showcase that with UGC and the shopper says, ‘great, this is a brand that understands me and what I’m looking for.’”Bernice Merlini,eCommerce Marketing Manager,NYX

The NYX site is peppered with imagery and shoppable tutorial videos of real influencers applying makeup. If you’re shopping in one of 12 NYX stores equipped with digital displays, shoppers can scan an item and see the product being applied and worn by real consumers on large in-store displays and smaller in-aisle displays.

NYX does this by crowdsourcing approved selfies from social media. The company partnered with Olapic, a Commerce Cloud certified LINK technology partner, on the integration. Olapic algorithms analyze the images for quality to help determine which will be most effective; images that lead to actual sales are flagged as successful and fed back into the system for reuse.

“If you’re shopping online, you can’t try products on, so we need to get as close to [a true in-store experience] as possible with user-generated content,” says Merlini.

To further engage with and involve its consumers, the company runs an annual competition, the FACE Awards, where video bloggers and makeup influencers create theme-based looks (fairy tale and spring awakening are two recent examples) and tutorials using its products. Since budding makeup artists sometimes use the products in creative and unanticipated ways, the competition actually helps inspire new products and collections.

“We care what our customer thinks about, and how they use our product.”

The NYX site focuses as much on the customer journey as it does the destination – a.k.a. the purchase. With a catalog of more than 2,700 products, it’s easy for a shopper to get lost in the all the options, so NYX has applied granular filtering to guide the shopper to the perfect item. For example, an eye shadow search yields five options for “formula,” five for “finish” and three for “coverage.”

“We spend a lot of time thinking about how a customer shops for our products because there are a lot of nuances with beauty. If we know a shopper loves a bold look we can showcase that with UGC and the shopper says, ‘great, this is a brand that understands me and what I’m looking for.’”

That extends to all facets of its interaction with customers. The NYX customer tends to favor vivid looks and colors, a fact not lost on the company, which uses colorful iconography and vibrant visuals all over the site to cement its brand identity.

In short, when shoppers are on the NYX site, there is no confusion with any other beauty brand.

That’s why NYX was named number 19 in the L2 Digital IQ Index of 106 beauty brands. The firm noted that NYX “continues to excel in shoppable UGC on site with a filterable library based on a campaign hashtag.”

It has been such a standout that parent company L’Oreal, with more than 20 beauty brands in its portfolio, cited NYX’s “very strong” growth in the first quarter of 2016.

Many retailers talk about being ‘customer-centric,’ but NYX walks the talk. “We work with our customers as a way to differentiate us as an authority in beauty space,” says Merlini. “We’re doing guided selling and all those things but in a NYX way.”

CASE STUDY: How NYX Cosmetics Stands Out in a Sea of Sameness

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