Strategy Director, Helen Spencer, discusses how shifts in attitudes to our hair are impacting the work we do with our clients.

In The House

Innovations and initiatives from Strat House clients and partners.

• Unilever helping women farmers to grow pineapples and their incomes
• Adidas takes on Samsung’s controversial ‘Night Owls’ ad in women’s safety campaign
• Unilever Study Reveals Influence of Influencers in Sustainable Behavior Change
• Dove are standing up for #KidsOnlineSafety
• Gong cha named best food & drink franchise at the 2023 Global Franchise Awards
• Find out why LinkedIn And Dove Are In It Together To Help End Hair Discrimination

A brand new look – inside out thinking for hair

The snaking lines from barbers, ‘before and afters’ in your feeds and new looks revealed on Teams signal hairdressers are back in business.

While many of us ‘upskilled’ during the lockdowns (as sales of hair dye and clippers attest) the jubilant rush back into professional hands reflects the importance of the connection between our hair and our identity, and the consequent value we place on our care for it.

The connection to our identity is not new news, as many a meme can attest 🙂

But in our work across multiple hair and beauty brands we’ve seen a pronounced shift in the last year. The impact of Covid has changed how we prioritise and plan for our wellbeing and what 2020 seems to have unlocked is an explicit appreciation by consumers of the emotional benefits of our hair and beauty routines, in addition to those that come from the end result.

Our work with Dove means we’ve been talking about the positive power of beauty for a while. (And for further reading we’d recommend Autumn Whitefield-Madrano’s Face Value: The hidden ways beauty shapes women’s lives – a well-researched and thoughtful examination of the many positive ways in which women use beauty as a positive tool.)

So we’re really excited about this reframing of beauty as the means to something, rather than an end in itself. These self-care rituals have been our chance to reconnect with ourselves, with the power to transport us and change our mindsets.

It’s running in parallel with another important consumer trend: an increasing savviness around products and ingredients. Across the board consumers are investing more time and money in finding the hair products that really work for them. We’re not the first to talk about the ‘skinification’ of hair but it certainly does seem to be driving the demand for prestige haircare (sales were up 11% – NPD Group, Q3 2020 vs 2019) and it has become one of the fastest growing beauty categories).

“People started applying expectations from other categories, which, let’s face it, have always been a lot more innovative than hair care.”

The Business of Fashion, Is Scalp Care the New Skin Care? 2021

The ongoing evolution of how consumers think and feel about their hair, and its care, impacts how we as brand strategists think about brand development. In the past, if we’re honest, the focus for a haircare brand often seemed to be on what’s explicitly outward facing; attractive packaging design and functional, benefit led messaging. But now expectations and needs have grown.

With a much more knowledgeable consumer, of course the core of the brand has to start with an amazing product that exceeds consumer expectations. But that is categorically no longer enough. As our haircare needs shift beyond the functional, as marketers and planners we need to draw on the increasingly layered emotional connection we have with our hair – offering an emotional benefit that recognises both our internal and external mindsets.

As a consequence, brands’ marketing also needs to shift inwards, showing the brand for what it is and what it stands for, and by default showing the consumer who they are if they purchase their products. In this case, we’re finding that a considered inward focus – from consumer insight, product and to people – does not limit but instead offers opportunity to create greater transformational change.

As ever, we’ve been playing with a model for how we approach this type of thinking and we thought it might be useful to share:

It’s not rocket science of course, but sometimes simply making the implicit explicit can be a powerful tool in strategy. And it feels to us as if the shift to an open acknowledgement of the duality of our hair’s emotional power, is an important step past thinking it was ever about appearance alone.