Study of consumer perception towards green beauty brands

Abstract

There has been a phenomenal shift in the beauty and personal care industry in the recent years. We have seen the proliferation of various beauty products in different categories. Globally there is an increasing trend of associating beauty products with causes that are close to the heart of the customers. In the Indian context we see new brands like Wow, Mamaearth, the Man company etc coming up with claims of being organic, sustainable and cruelty free as there is an increasing awareness and concern about these issues. We have noticed that the current day millennial customers are developing a preference for organic and sustainable products and so even traditional market leaders are having to align their brand strategies with that. The purpose of this project was to study in detail and prove the hypothesis that millennials prefer the new “green” beauty brands over the traditional beauty brands which had other positioning. The project further also checks the other factors that makes these green brands more appealing to the customers. It was found that trends in Social Media is an important factor in influencing a customer’s purchase intention. The project discussions started with a qualitative study which included performing secondary research and deriving insights from focus group discussions. The exploratory study enabled us to understand the prevailing customer perceptions about both new green brands and traditional beauty brands as a result of which the hypotheses were formulated. To collect data a survey form was floated on social media and the responses were analyzed. Statistical methods like regression and two sample t-test were run on MS Excel to prove the hypotheses. Some interesting insights about the millennial customer perceptions were found. The hypothesis was proven that millennials prefer the new organic brands compared to traditional beauty brands. It was also found that packaging and organic ingredients positively affect purchase intention of the millennials. Although, one counter-intuitive finding was that cruelty free attribute has a negative influence on purchase intention. There may have been some data discrepancy in that scenario. These findings have led to some important managerial implications for traditional brands and indicate that they should increase their social media presence and clarify their sustainable positioning to tackle and win over their competitors.