Case Study: How incling Helped Benefit Cosmetics Uncover What Drives Beauty Brand Switching
By incling
- case study
- Shopper Research
- Online Communities
- Insight Communities
- Diary Studies
- Online Qualitative
- Customer Experience (CX) Feedback
- Behavioural Research
Benefit Cosmetics, a market leader in the prestige brow and mascara categories, recognised that shoppers often switched between mass-market and prestige beauty brands. While the brand understood switching was common, it needed to uncover the social, functional and emotional factors driving these decisions. Benefit partnered with incling to gain deeper qualitative insight into why customers left, stayed loyal or traded up across the UK and US.
incling delivered a targeted three-day research programme involving 30 participants in the UK and US who had recently switched between mass and prestige products. Using incling’s continuous research platform, participants spent 20 minutes each day sharing their beauty routines and uploading images of their product collections. Structured discussions explored the motivations behind brand switching and the influence of social media, while a participant-led competitive audit revealed how Benefit compared with other prestige brands.
The research identified the key performance pillars that influenced loyalty and brand switching, including versatility, ease of use and formula longevity. These insights helped Benefit develop both defensive strategies to retain existing customers and offensive strategies to encourage mass-market shoppers to switch to its prestige products.
