The Background: Ulta is a beauty retailer that combines shopping with experience and premium brands with everyday ones. However, today with locations mostly in the suburbs, Sephora always innovating and a price and promotion strategy the brand needed to find a way to build equity in the name Ulta, in the brand Ulta and start talking to women and girls in a new way.
The Challenge: We needed to drive traffic and improve comp store sales by creating a fresh communication approach that would bring new people in as well as delight the loyal customers Ulta has today.
The Research: Secondary research and brand audit. Competetive analysis. Social listening. Focus groups with Ulta shoppers and non-Ulta shoppers. Store visits and makeovers.
The Discovery: The beauty industry with lots of help from mainstream media has socialized women to be ruthlessly competitive with one another. However, in spite of what society shows and tells women, beauty is an intrinsic and emotional connection that women share with others and use to lift each other up.
The Strategy: Share the beauty.
The Ulta Strategy Deck can be viewed in full here.
