Lisa Gallo: the role of emotion in the future of beauty

Lisa Gallo from the Avon Innovation Centre shares her insight on the role of emotion in the future of beauty

Recently I was honoured to speak at an inspiring INNOCOS event in Italy, representing Avon and sharing our view on the future of beauty. Among some fascinating talks on hyper-personalisation and the digitisation of the beauty world, I used my own platform to argue that cutting edge product development and big data needs to be harnessed alongside human emotions.

Imagine a future where you can customise your beauty products every morning in your bathroom, because you’ve woken up feeling exhausted and need a little vitamin boost in your moisturiser, or a shot of extra-calming ingredients because you’ve been stressed out at work. You can even lace your fragrance with a boost for when you want to feel more confident, more sexy or more in control.

What separates this vision of the future from the one we have now is this: in the future, we’ll know not just what our customer is doing, and what she’s thinking…but how she’s feeling.

As social media evolves, every single one of our consumers, at some level, becomes an ‘influencer’ in her own right. She leaves comments on beauty posts. She posts about her own products. She recommends products to her friends both on and offline. And when it comes to products she loves – or she doesn’t – she doesn’t hold back.

At Avon, our conversations with our own community are now so often and so deep that you could say we don’t just create products anymore, we co-create with them with our Representatives and our consumers.  Infinite Effects, arguably our most game-changing product of the last 15 years, had its genesis in one woman in a focus group saying, “I stop using products after three months because I feel like they stop working. I feel like they’re not helping me out any more.”

In the future, I believe, it’s this emotional insight that we capture during our discussions that should be driving our scientific research and understanding.  And through bringing her in, we allow her to feel a sense of community.

For Avon, that’s where the human touch will be most powerful. And we are so grateful that we have 6 million women, each of them working to create brighter futures for themselves and their families, every single day. What better illustration of the future of beauty could there be than that?