Social Media Monitoring of Lush Cosmetics

Introduction

Lush is a multi-million dollar business (which is still privately-owned) with over 600 stores in 43 countries that produces many types of high-quality, handmade cosmetic products from face, hair, hand/foot care to bath/shower care, massage bars and even fragrances.  All Lush products are vegetarian, and less than 30% contain animal products such as beeswax, honey, free range, unfertilized eggs and lanolin. Being a highly environmentally conscious company Lush uses minimal packaging which is always 100% recyclable (and made from recycled materials). I’ve been a dedicated fan of Lush products since 2005 when a friend from UK brought me a solid shampoo bar (yes, solid shampoo) as a gift. So it only made sense for me to take a closer look at the company for the Social Media Monitoring project.

Lush’s Social Media Strategy: bird’s-eye view  

Lush has always prided itself of being a company with a “neighborhood feel” and a “conscious heart”. They use local ingredients in their products, don’t buy from or do business with companies that do animal testing and have a very strong environmental/conservationist stance. Given those corporate values it should be of no surprise that Lush has been very successful in building a very active and passionate community around the brand and its products. The key factor to this success is the fact that Lush fans are not only thrilled about the quality of the products but are also very passionate about what Lush stands for (no preservatives, against animal testing, fair trade etc).

As one could guess social media marketing played a significant role in building this customer community. Compared to its competitors Lush is an extremely involved company when it comes to social media. They run several pages on Facebook, are on Twitter, have a YouTube channel and run a customer forum in virtually each country they operate in. Given their target demographic, which skews heavily towards younger (chimes well with their passionate stance on several environmental and conservational issues) and female (not surprising for a cosmetics company) internet users, this appears to be the right approach (and the empirical data from sources like Social Mention, Compete, Quantcast and GoogleAnalytics, which I am going to look at in more detail later, supports that hypothesis). Further on, as we have learned from Groundswell, young people are more likely to be Producers and/or Engagers making social media websites like YouTube.com, Facebook.com, Twitter etc. excellent places for Lush to reach their audience. A smaller but potentially equally important segment that Lush doesn’t appear to explicitly target through its social media marketing strategy would be “moms”, as they are both female and more likely to be conscious about health and environment.

Let’s take a close look at what Lush is currently doing and how well it’s working.    

Customer Forum

Lush has an extremely well-maintained and comprehensive customer forum which is easily accessible from its homepage. It has a host of information on topics ranging from product description/questions and user reviews to social initiatives. The forum does require registration One of the greatest things about the forum in my opinion is that it is completely uncensored (except in cases of something being obviously offensive) so rants are just as welcome as raves. Such open approach gives Lush’s customer forum a true sense of a community, where everyone has their say and everyone is entitled to their opinion. Further on, Lush not only allows their customers to rant but they are also listening. For example on more than one occasion a certain product was brought back into stores based on overwhelming forum response to it being discontinued.

 

Figure 1: Lush’s North America Forum Homepage

Facebook  

Lush has several Facebook fan pages: one main corporate one, many local store ones and Lush Times (which is a page allowing customers to post pictures of themselves using Lush products). The overall tone for Lush’s Facebook pages is very informal and conversational, making people feel that they really are connecting with fellow friends and Lush enthusiasts.

The corporate page is very well-maintained, organized and updated frequently. It serves a dual function of the central hub for Lush fans to express their love as well as the place to fosters the global Lush community by focusing on topics pertaining to the company as a whole, such as new product development, environmental and social initiatives the company supports etc. For example Lush used its corporate page to promote events like the Random Kindness Day, the Earth Hour etc.

Figure 2: Lush Cosmetics Facebook Page (US-run)

In my opinion the key ingredients in Lush’s success are their extremely prompt response and a friendly and informal conversational tone. In the examples below not only was the question addressed within an hour of it being posted but the administrator also took time and effort to provide a comprehensive and thorough response.  

Figure 3: Examples of Lush interacting with its Facebook fans

High engagement level, informal/friendly tone and of course great content is what makes Lush’s Facebook fan base feel that they are heard and appreciated, providing all that’s necessary for an active and passionate community.

To supplement the impact of the main corporate page Lush manages a host of store-specific pages that aim at creating a community at the local level with specific in-store deals, events, contests and pictures.

 Figure 5: Lush Times Facebook page and an example of a happy Lush fan professing his love for Lush products

 

YouTube

Lush’s appears to have at least two YouTube channels:  LushCosmetics (UK-run) and LushVidz (US-run). Both are full of videos about the company, its products, what are Lush staff’s favorites etc but also quite a few on the company’s business philosophy, its charitable work and social initiatives.

While the videos appear to be semi-professionally made they still manage to maintain a very casual look & feel, giving them the necessary level of “authenticity” to not be regarded as company self-promotion. Interestingly neither of the channels appears to engage too much with shoppers per se but in my opinion frequently updated content and heavy (and enthusiastic) involvement of Lush store staff end up making up for it.

Lush’s YouTube channel is good, very good in fact but I do feel that Lush could benefit from better organization: for example they could do a better job with grouping the videos into playlists with more comprehensive names like “About Lush”, “How we make our stuff”, etc. Additionally I’d suggest creating a playlist with videos on how best to use lush products, especially considering that some of them, like henna bars, require quite a bit of preparation while others (like massage bars or shampoo bars) may be somewhat confusing/intimidating to first-time users.  

Blogs

A simple search on blogsearch.google.com for “Lush cosmetics” yielded over 21K mentions in the past month; granted that’s not a lot compared to say 400K mentions of Coca-Cola but for a fairly niche-market cosmetics company Lush appears to be fairing pretty well in the blogosphere. One of the things that struck me while looking through the blogs was that there were virtually no negative mentions or feedback and when there were average users, not Lush employees, stood up to defend their brand – that’s the power of the groundswell at work.

How let’s look at what the metrics say about how well Lush is faring in the groundswell. For this part of the project I mostly used the data from Compete and Social Mention.

Compete

Based on Compete’s data Lush website (the US one at least) is doing very well. The number of Unique Visitors to the site has increased about 10% over the past year (other important metrics like Average Stay and Attention increased as well).

Figure 8: Compete.com Unique Visitor traffic to LushUSA.com over the past 12 months

 

The significant impact social media marketing is having on Lush’s online presence can be better seen if we look at referral breakdown to lushusa.com

Figure 9: Compete.com top referral sites to LushUSA.com in February 2011

As you can see from the table above, YouTube and Facebook at #3 and #4 top referral domains following Lush.com and Google, indicating that Lush’s social media marketing strategy has been extremely successful at driving traffic to the site (at by extension at building a strong brand). To put this into perspective about 7% of referral traffic to lushusa.com came from Facebook.com compared to less than 2% for Lush’s biggest competitor BodyShop-USA.com

Further on, total search referrals to the Lush’s website have increased 16% Y-O-Y, indicating that people are increasingly looking for Lush-associated keywords on search engines and with paid search making up only a small percentage of total search referrals most of this traffic ends up being free for Lush (Groundswell windfall)

Figure 10: Search breakdown (total vs. paid) to LushUSA.com for the past 12 months

Social Mention

On a more qualitative side Lush appears to be very well-liked by its customers.

Figure 11: SocialMention snap shot comparison of “lush cosmetics” (March 15, March 22 and March 29)

 

Based on the data from Social Mention its average Sentiment stands at a whopping average of 16:1, combined with an average of 46% Passion score I think it would be safe to say that Lush was successful in acquiring a very engaged, vocal and adoring following (again, all those scores are significantly higher compared to Body Shop).

Findings summary

All in all Lush seems to have a very good handle on their social marketing strategy. They are actively engaged in several types of online social media and have used it successfully to promote its products and brand. Lush does have outstanding products, positive corporate image and has effectively succeeded in promoting both through the groundswell by creating a strong and passionate online community. That said, I would offer a few suggestions to further build on their existing success:

·    Create a loyalty program (and/or a referral program)

A few customers called out the lack of such program as surprising, especially considering that Lush products aren’t always cheap. The call for such program further indicates that Lush users view their relationship with Lush as something different from their relationship with other cosmetics brands (have you ever heard of customers asking for a loyalty program from lay Lancome?) suggesting that Lush should not discount this opportunity to further strengthen their brand and community.

  

·   Consider employing Location-based Marketing 

Location-based Marketing could be a winning strategy for Lush, especially considering that shoppers appear to have a lot of loyalty for their neighborhood stores. In this case the awards don’t necessarily have to be monetary; for example the “Mayor” of a local Lush store could be invited to go “back stage” and see how Lush products are created.

·     Better organization of YouTube channels

While Lush’s YouTube channels have a lot of great information they appear to be slightly disorganized (especially considering the amount of content). Better organization could help improve user experience and eliminate potential frustration; it could also help shoppers easily distinguish between Lush-produced and amateur videos minimizing the possibility of a bad experience with a Lush product based on a misinformed video.

·     Add a “How To…” playlist to help newbies with more “complex” or unusual Lush products

While most of this information is already available on the Customer Forum adding a playlist with “how-to” videos could help further engage existing customers as well as acquire new ones.

·    Engage the “mom” segment

In my opinion the “mom” segment could carry a lot of potential for Lush. As we learned from Groundswell moms are a bit less likely to be “creators” of content, however they are actively engaged online as consumers. Lush could engage that segment by creating content (through already existing social media channels like Facebook and YouTube) that specifically targets the segment (e.g. a video featuring a dermatologist that explains why Lush products are not only suitable but also beneficial for young kids)