How Do You Use This?

How an Inexperienced Male Becomes Educated in Makeup

The beginning of Avon’s long relationship with J. Walter Thompson started with a website. Avon wanted to redesign its digital makeup presence in Brazil. They were suffering to attract young women to their digital ecosystem.

Avon was then, as it is today, the leader in makeup product sales in Brazil, as it focused on medium-low to lower-income segments.

Wrong assumptions

I landed on this pitch totally ill-informed about the make-up world. Usually, pitches give an opportunity to get familiar with the client’s business and the consumer’s relationship with the category. It is a part of the process that I appreciate. But in this case, I felt overwhelmed because I was beginning from zero.

On hindsight, this was an advantage that got me more alert and willing to listen. Instead of having a hypothesis in my head and going after data to confirm if it was true, I really needed to take my time and listen and learn.

Our first explanation was a lazy one — people were not going to Avon’s website because, presumably, it lacked innovation and sophisticated tools. Wrong. An exhaustive benchmark showed that Avon had more functionalities, tools, and content than any of its pricey competitors, by a great margin.

Digital benchmark: Avon was already ahead of all competitors.

Understanding the Consumers     

Our second explanation was an easy, elitist one. People were not into Avon because, as a cheap brand, there was no engagement surrounding it. Wrong again. Not only were the ladies we interviewed avid Avon consumers, but they also loved the brand’s message and the quality products brought to the table for its consumers.

We held multiple sessions with women, especially young ones, trying to understand their relationship with makeup and beauty and how they used the internet to navigate that world.

We were puzzled by how they described their online activity.

We kept digging.

I mean, really understanding the consumers

We decided to run a dumb-free test and asked some Avon users to browse the internet in front of us while we asked questions. We called this a “digital ethnography.”

We noticed quite a unique relationship with the web.

Those women didn’t see a website as a collection of pages organized around a sitemap. Instead, they saw website sections as random results that appeared after they made a Google search.

I was surprised as I watched one woman arrive at Avon’s website only to not find what she was looking for and, instead of engaging with the navigation menu, return to Google and search again. She then clicked on the website again from a different search result.

In hindsight, it made perfect sense. For context, it’s essential to understand the state of the internet in Brazil at that time: Facebook was reigning supreme, and Instagram was beginning to pick up. Also, Google and YouTube have been around for quite a while. All these interfaces had one thing in common:

A search box on top of a list of results.

This realization might seem trivial today, but it was essential to understand that the new generation didn’t see the web as a collection of individual websites at the time. They didn’t view each site as its own universe with a structure they’d need to familiarize themselves with to get what they needed. They never had to think about the concept of a “sitemap.” The search engines were advanced enough to solve that problem. And that’s where they spent most of their time online.

Once that was clear, the new Avon website wrote itself. We needed to reproduce the same simplicity and structure familiar to these consumers to increase ease of use and time spent in Avon’s digital world.

This commitment to truly understanding consumers’ behavior awarded J. Walter Thompson the Avon digital account. The subsequent new business triggered a series of novel wins for the agency, from media to creativity to a global account. I was involved in a significant part of this story, and with every new project, I had the opportunity to learn more about the fascinating world of women’s beauty products.

Impact

• The agency was awarded the digital account for makeup in Latin America and later became one of the top three clients for the agency.