Project parameters

5 days

291 18-25-year-old women

Qual and quant

Turkey and Romania

The challenge

The beauty and personal care market continues to grow year-on-year. However, this global cosmetics, skin care, perfume, and personal care company experienced a decline in revenue in Q4 2023, impacted by portfolio streamlining and adjustments. To optimise its offering and drive revenue, the company needed to develop an effective marketing strategy for its newest brand.

Audience research was required to explore the factors that influence consumer perceptions of beauty in Turkey and Romania, as well as the ways in which they define beauty and femininity for themselves and how the brand could best align with these perceptions. To uncover the true and nuanced attitudes of 18-25-year-old women, the client team were seeking a bottom-up approach that could capture authentic consumer language at scale.

The action

To deliver detailed themes, along with the true language of the audience, Streetbees harnessed its community of bees (consumers) in Turkey and Romania to capture both qualitative and quantitative insights from 291 18-25-year-old women. By conversing with these women through its WhatsApp-style mobile app, Streetbees was able to ask them a combination of closed-text and open-text questions in a familiar and comfortable setting.

Using LLMs, the tool was also able to optimise its questions in real time to delve deeper into what they had shared, making it easier to uncover the nuance behind their answers and the ‘why’ behind their attitudes.

This resulted in thousands of rich verbatims that were then coded and quantified to identify the true meaning of beauty and femininity among this specific audience to feed into brand strategy. The quantitative stats and qualitative verbatims were delivered in a tailored, interactive dashboard in just 5 days, with a concise executive summary and the ability to cut and explore the data.

“This is super! We collected all of this data in just 5 days, so it’s far beyond my expectation. Not only did we collect the data in that time, but we also have actionable insights to use. It's really cool. Thank you so much.” shared the company’s Director of Insights.

The outcome

The client team were able to clearly identify that perceptions of beauty and femininity differed between the two markets at varying development stages. Market perception wasn't linear.

In addition to this, the client team had a hypothesis that these perceptions were greatly influenced by media and societal influences. However, the insights revealed that, while media and societal influences still mattered, their impact was diminishing.

Instead, the brand needed to refine its focus on inside-out beauty from a market perspective with specific language cues to effectively market its newest brand to these audiences.

“I hope this will be the beginning of a new and modern approach to market research, because this is really what we need to make the right decisions.”