How to get consumers to change their behavior (WOW)
Before thinking about the decisions WOW has to make in order to define its strategy ahead, I want to present a research in order to understand what influences consumers decisions (specifically regarding skin care) and a framework to think about how to be more persuasive. WOW needs not only to be relevant in the Why, but also in the What, When, Where and How in order to be effective to change the consumers’ behavior towards fairness creams.
First, I want to present a research performed by McKinsey & Co. (1) that shows the most influential touch points by stage of consumer decision journey, in order to understand what influence consumers when doing a purchase. This study specifically includes skin care as one of the sectors analyzed.
Here, we can see that for closure, that includes the skin care sector, company driven marketing (done by Unilever in this case) accounts for 22% of the relevant touch points for the consumer when making a decision. On the other hand, we see that consumer-driven marketing (word-of-mouth and online research) is quite important with a 31%, and the store interaction is the most relevant with 43% of the most-influential touch points. For WOW, this means that there is an important opportunity (and challenge) to start being influential not only with the store agents, but also with online research reviews and word-of-mouth.
Second, I want to present Cialdini’s persuasion principles as a framework to evaluate how holistically is WOW thinking about persuading consumers (2). In my opinion, WOW has done a great job with the “Liking” principle working with recognized actors in India, but has job to do incorporating the other persuasive principles.
Working with actors also helps with “Social Proof”, but it is not sufficient as word-of-mouth and the behavior of peers is also very important. I see opportunities for WOW to generate a desire to give back in kind (”Reciprocity”), and generating a desire to maintain consistency in what consumers have already said (”Commitment”) with targeted and personalized consumer campaigns. Moreover, working with health authorities in order to remove technical validity of fairness creams (”Authority”) could be an effective tactic. Unfortunately, “Scarcity” will -almost- never be the case in mass consumer products.
We have worked on the What and How, and we have When and Where left to be analyzed. The most effective time to reach a consumer is when she/he is doing the purchase (as seen in table 1), specifically in the store, and when the consumer is doing online research. As a consequence, I would recommend WOW doing a campaign to directly approach consumers by negotiating discounts for them to use in other skin care products (being influential at the time of the purchase), and reaching out to store agents, by offering incentives for them to promote creams that are not Fair&Lovely. Both of these two strategies can be achieved by working with a competitor’s brand, like L’Oreal. Finally, I would recommend WOW to be very active in online review websites, trying to apply all of six Cialdini’s principles, to further influence consumers’ behavior towards fairness creams.
(1) https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/marketing-and-sales/our-insights/the-consumer-decision-journey
(2) https://laconteconsulting.com/definitions/#influence