Brittany Antoinette, Founder of The Idea Girl, on Brand Strategy for Beauty & Wellness Brands

The market for the beauty and wellness industries are massive and the growth has not halted, yet. The U.S. 's beauty industry is currently worth $100 billion, while the U.S. 's wellness industry is worth $450 billion (Credit: Statistista). The reality is: everyone wants a piece of this. However, how many businesses will thrive in such a competitive, yet large beauty and wellness landscape? The answer depends on the collaborative efforts of founders and the brand strategists they are working with to well position these companies in the market. 

Founder of The Idea Girl and Not So CEO, Brittany Antoinette, can help with this. As the Founder of The Idea Girl, Brittany serves as a consultant of her independently-owned practice building brands with “beauty, brains and brawn”! With a creative career first in retail fashion (merchandising) to storytelling to marketing and then most recently brand strategy, Brittany has certainly cut out a special lane for herself assisting Black and Brown founders in identifying the right brand approaches to successfully build a story and community around their products. Her ultimate goal: to better connect consumers to the product! 

Below, we explore Brittany’s approach to assisting beauty and wellness companies with their brand strategy. This is useful for fellow brand strategists who are producing outstanding business outcomes for their clients.

Step 1: Brief Questionnaire

When working with new clients, it is imperative that you create opportunities to gain an understanding of how a founder perceives their brand and who their target audience is. Brittany does this by sharing a brief questionnaire with them. 

Step 2: Exploring the Founder’s Story 

There are primarily two ways to build a brand: (1) build around the identity and story of a founder (2) place all power in the identity of the product. While the ideal answer is to pursue both, unfortunately, you will have to decide which one of the two approaches will gain the most traction and impact for the company. According to Brittany, for beauty and wellness consumer-based companies, brands should be built around the identity and origin stories of the founder. To explore the history of the founder, Brittany asks very specific and intentional questions including:

• What is your story? 
• Tell me about your background.
• What problem did you come across?
• Who are the other people experiencing this problem?
• What did you think the solution was?
• How did you decide your company will become the solution?

Step 3: Create the Ideal Target Audience 

You want to work with the client to identify who their audience is and ensure that it aligns with the problem they are trying to solve. This is important because you do not want to spend a ton of money marketing to the wrong audience. Brittany mentions,

What you want to do is, you want to create a lifestyle. You should not just be selling a product, you should be selling a lifestyle! You should be selling the outcome or the benefits of what life is like after using these products. Is this person more joyous? Are they happier? Is their life more convenient?

• Case: Think of Apple. It is a technology company that prides itself on its tools being design friendly and easy to navigate. Its products are well synchronized across multiple tools and they are also just “fly and make you look cooler”. That is what you want for the brands you are working with. 

When determining the target audience strategy, you want to focus on demographics. You can leverage Statisa, for this data. Demographic information can include:

• Age
• Gender
• Location 
• Nationality
• Occupation
• Educational level
• Income level

Why is this important? As mentioned by Brittany,

If you have a product that costs $3,000, but yet, your audience only makes $40,000 a year; you are creating a barrier for them to purchase your product being that they cannot afford it.

Step 4: Competitive Analysis

• Businesses need to know who their direct and indirect competitors are. They need to know who is solving, if not the same exact problem, a very similar problem. While direct competition is self explanatory, indirect competition can seem a bit unclear. An example of indirect competition is solving the problem of lip moisturizing with lip balms. Your indirect competitor may be the vaseline petroleum jelly. It may not look the same nor be held in the same type of container (stick vs. jar) but it is solving the same problem of moisturizing lips. This is why as a brand strategist it is your duty to diligently work with clients to ensure they understand what is out there in the market and who they are competing with. 

Step 5: Brand Positioning

Brand positioning is when a company is trying to determine how they can differentiate themselves from everybody else. Their mindset needs to be “Yeah, someone else did it first, but I can do it better.” 

• Case: Brittany worked with the popular skincare brand, Topicals, founded by Olamide Olowe. Topicals came to Brittany to develop a brand strategy that builds a strong relationship between the Topicals brand and Gen-Z consumers. The founder realized there were no cute products for women dealing with skin issues beyond acne. She wanted to solve other skin problems including hyperpigmentation and eczema. What would make this brand different is being able to transform the branding around what typically would be dermatology sold products in boring packaging to a more aesthetically pleasing product similar to brands that you see in Sephora and Ulta Beauty like Glossier. Women with these skin issues can't use Glossier and similar products, but they can use Olamide’s science-backed skin products; and now, with a more fashionable and aesthetically pleasing packaging that makes you excited to use it while improving your physical health. By pursuing this brand approach, as well as using brand images of people with no touch-ups, Topicals with the help of Brittany’s brand expertise, has built a cult-like following around their brand. 

When it comes to brand positioning, at this point, brands have to ask themselves::

• What do you believe in? 
• What are your values? 
• What are your core pillars? 
• Why are people going to choose me over that? 

Step 6: Brand Identity

Brand identity can be broken down into two components: verbal identity and visual identity. 

Verbal Identity

When you think of verbal identity, you should think to yourself:

• What is your personality when talking about skincare? 
• Are you more tranquil? Are you more serene? Are you more bold, loud and rambunctious? 
• What do I want people to think of when they think of me or my tone when they read a caption on social media versus whether or not they see me write a blog online? What does that voice sound like? What does that say about my personality? Is my brand energy more feminine or more masculine? 
• Am I more conservative? Or am I more casual? 
• Am I more pretentious, or am I more down to earth?

These are important because you want to be able to make sure that you're speaking to the right people and you're using the right tone. This is where brand messaging comes from. Answering these questions will help you create powerful statements around your brand. 

Visual Identity

You need to think of how your brand looks; how it meets the eye. You need to ensure it is consistent and builds trust. You want to ensure it aligns with the verbal identity. You want to ensure your product “looks cool” and consumers have positive stories when using them. What plays a role in this? A couple of factors which include:

• What are your brand colors going to be? How is this inspired by the verbal identity of the brand using color psychology? (Example: Red is the color of power. It is the color of sexiness, romance and boldness.)
• What type of font (typography) will you be using? (Example: If you see Times New Roman, you're instantly going to get a more conservative traditional feel. But if you were to see Comic Sans, it's a lot more easygoing. It seems more casual. It seems very playful and fun.)

Step 7: The Launch/Community Rave

Once your product is officially launched , Brittany wants to help brands get to a point where people are raving about the product. We want people talking about it all over social media and having positive reviews, testimonies and actually purchasing these products.

Step 8: Retention

How do you maintain the community around the brand? You want to get to a point where a person goes from being aware of your product to now becoming someone constantly promoting that product. Consumers trust other consumer’s opinions. 

With Brittany’s 8-Step Framework to effectively build beauty and wellness brands, founders and brand strategists can come together to truly build products and experiences that last. Thanks to Brittany’s amazing traits of:

• Being a powerful storyteller
• Being transparent, relatable and comforting
• Deep knowledge of the African diasporan culture in terms of our history culturally, socially and financially

Black and Brown leaders can well position themselves to thrive in this market. Need more guidance in building a solid brand for your company or client’s company? Check out Brittany’s Making the Brand Workbook. This book is the perfect solution for freelancers and founders to help them build out a strategy and framework for all verbal and visual forms of communication. It’s also on sale for the rest of the month! 

Remember,

We are not selling products, we are selling transformation. That’s the impact you want to have on your consumer’s lives. - Brittany Antoinette 

Interested in connecting with Brittany? You can:

• Reach out to her via website 
• Follow her on instagram
• Follow her brands Not So CEO and The Ideal Girl on instagram