Do Expert Recommendations for Lipsticks Meet Consumer Expectations?

It’s National Lipstick Day! In honor of all the beautiful shades we adorn our lips with, we thought we’d see how some of the proclaimed best stack up against consumer feedback.?

Earlier this month, Forbes asked makeup artist Jenn Streicher about the best lipsticks no matter the occasion or need.??Given the various shades, formulations, and price points for lipstick, it can be a daunting category. Streicher shared her thoughts here.??As you can see, her recommendations were almost all Prestige lipsticks except for one ‘mass’ brand.?

Undoubtedly, she knows the category well, but we wanted to see if consumers agreed with her expert advice, particularly as the average price for her selections was $31.00 (with the highest being $58.00).

To understand this, we did a couple of things: First, we looked at the star rating and review number for each recommendation.??Sephora sells all but a few of these products, so our next step was to measure these recommendations against the category of prestige lip products. For that, we pulled all the star ratings and review numbers for the category on Sephora for a total of 232 products.?

How did these recommendations stack up?

“Lipsticks” median star rating at Sephora was 4.5, and the average review number is 564.?

For her recommendations, only one lipstick had more reviews than the average for the category.??Half of the recommendations – five – had the same or higher star rating than the median star rating for the category.?

Next, we did the same exercise with Target to see how FDM lip products bear up against the expert recommendations and if consumers found value in less costly items.??We pulled all Target lipstick products (not including balms or chapstick) for 236 products.?

How did the recommendations do? FDM lipstick category had a median star rating of 4.4, and an average number of 641 reviews.??The average price point of these 236 products is $11.75.

What do we conclude from this? The representative sample of ‘mass’ brands have a comparable overall performance as measured by star rating even at almost a third of the price.??Net, while an influencer endorsement is often helpful to enable halo credibility, ‘mass’ brands have the opportunity to use the “prestige quality at a fraction of the cost” positioning to their advantage by using consumers’ own performance rating.

Why did we do this???While it’s certainly helpful to consult expert lists when making purchasing choices, for something as small as a tube of lipstick or as expensive as a car, it’s also important to note that consumers are relying upon each other social network to make these decisions. As a brand, monitoring your product and measuring it against competition allows for a whole host of benefits: what delight consumers, what disappointments them, what drives choice, and how to separate yourself from the competition.??It allows brands to understand what it takes to win with new initiatives, look for whitespaces in the market, and even develop consumer personas.??

To learn more about consumer reviews can do to help brands, check out a few case studies.