This episode of HBR On Strategy explores how Glossier, a makeup and skincare brand, successfully scaled its marketing efforts while maintaining its core brand values. Glossier's founder, Emily Weiss, initially built a strong digital community around the brand. After receiving funding, the company sought to expand its reach without sacrificing authenticity.
Glossier launched in 2014 as an e-commerce, direct-to-consumer makeup and skincare brand aimed at millennial women. From the start, Glossier’s founder Emily Weiss built a strong digital community around the brand. But after the company received its first major round of funding, Glossier was ready to scale up its marketing spending. The challenge: How to do that while also preserving the brand’s all-important authenticity?explains how to think about marketing when scaling a business.
BRIAN KENNY: All right, so you know of what you write here in terms of the case, in terms of the product and the quality of this product.BRIAN KENNY: So how did you hear about Glossier? And I’m curious as to how this case relates more directly to your research interests. BRIAN KENNY: What was her audience like? What were the things that she was hearing that made her sort of take this path?
BRIAN KENNY: Seems pretty consistent with what we know about the millennial generation and how they think about life and the products that they buy, and they’re very sensitive to marketing, they understand when they’re being marketed to. And so this feels like a much more authentic path for them to take. Who are her customers, if you could describe them?
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. And they’re considering several sort of options, routes that they could take with this money on how they might invest it. One of the tensions that I think comes through in the case is that they’ve built this brand on authenticity. As you scale, is it hard to sustain that sort of authenticity? I mean, inevitably, you become a little bit more commercial than you used to be.
BRIAN KENNY: What role do investors play in a situation like this? They obviously believe in what she’s doing and they believe in her and they believe in the product. But I would assume they’ve also got a point-of-view on how she should do things, and how do you balance that kind of pressure? BRIAN KENNY: And she’s leveraging that community, as you mentioned before. It’s like a feedback loop for them, right? So they’re getting ideas. Are they actually soliciting ideas from their customers, “Tell us what colors you want, what kind of makeup you want”?
JILL AVERY: Yeah. So particularly in the beauty industry, influencer marketing is getting very pricey. Some of the top influencers in the space charge $1 million a post, so you can quickly run through a media-JILL AVERY: You can quickly run through a media budget if you’re talking to that.
BRIAN KENNY: Does that sort of run the risk of … I don’t know … It feels to me like people may take advantage of that in a way that seems, again, incompatible with the authenticity of the brand. BRIAN KENNY: Okay. The case goes into their foray into brick and mortar as well. They opened some retail spots, which I thought that was really interesting.
BRIAN KENNY: We’ve been hearing a lot about DTC brands. They seem to really be emerging. Do you feel like this is probably the next wave of retail having the experience that you’ve had in the retail space?
Marketing Branding E-Commerce Digital Community Influencer Marketing
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