Brands vs consumers: vloggers still a huge force in beauty

Video beauty blogger (or vlogger) Tanya Burr’s latest collection​ ​will see her join such self-made YouTube sensations as Zoella (whose channel has garnered over 400 million views) and Michelle Phan (who boasts an incredible 1.1 billion views), in launching their own cosmetics brands.

Vlogging, where non-professional consumers post cosmetics product reviews onto the video sharing site YouTube, is an increasingly dominant platform within the beauty industry; a recent report by Pixability​ ​shows that beauty content has experienced a growth rate of 50% on the site over the last year.

But beauty brands are missing out: last year, just 3% of views generated on YouTube against beauty-related content were for branded content. 

Getting it wrong​

With vloggers and other beauty content creators controlling 97% of conversations around beauty and hosting 10 x more video content on YouTube, where are brands getting it so wrong?

It seems that regaining control of video content for beauty brands lies in increasing content’s frequency (currently vloggers publish 7 x more frequently) and in length (at the moment, the content brands currently publish is just too short). 

These two issues play part of the wider problem for beauty brands on YouTube: a sense of lacking authenticity. Vloggers communicate with their audience, offering tips and tutorials; but as it stands beauty brands continue to miss out on the more popular long-form beauty tutorials, sticking instead to less popular commercials.

“Vbloggers are doing better [than cosmetics brands] because they’re being authentic, they’re delivering a benefit, and they’re pushing out regular content. These are solvable problems for major brands​,” Merrily McGugan, Pixability’s marketing manager, has stated.

Waking up​ 

Brands are beginning to wake up to the huge untapped potential the platform poses though, and are working out how to make their mark.

“The beauty space on YouTube is massive and constantly evolving, and having a solid understanding of our audience and the influential beauty creator community is critical to our digital strategy,” ​Andrea Barton, Global Social Community Manager of Bobbi Brown Cosmetics, has stated.

Unilever is one major company looking to make amends, with its ‘All Things Hair’ channel, launched last year, looking to offer a vblogging avenue for the company’s video content.