Rebecca Green N0739091
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Contents. Brand Story Brand History The Benefit Mission The Benefit Vision Brand Values Brand Positioning
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Brand Guidelines Tone Of Voice Logo Tag Lines Fonts Colour
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Image Guidelines Advertisments Website Beauty Shots Social Media
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Products and Services 35 Bestsellers 38 Store Requirements 40 The Consumer 47 Pen Portraits 51 CSR/Sustainability/Ethics Bold Is Beautiful Animal Testing Sustainability
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Communication Guidelines The BeneBlog YouTube Our App PR Stunts and Competitions
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Ethics Clause 70
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Once Upon A Time...
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Our Brand Story. Jean and Jane Ford, the inseparable, twin brainboxes behind our fabulous range of beauty solutions, believe that, ‘laughter is the best cosmetic.’ After deciding to create a beauty boutique, instead of a casserole café, (yes…after flipping a coin!), we installed our legacy, ‘laughter is the best cosmetic’, at the heart of our brand. When we first came to the rescue of an exotic dancer’s beauty emergency, providing her with our now famous, ‘Benetint,’ we knew that solving beauty dilemmas was our forte, and with that, our easy-to-use, fun, makeup remedies were created to help girls worldwide fake it til’ they make it!
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Brand History.
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A Benefit Timeline...
1976
After graduating Indiana University, identical twins Jean and Jane Ford flipped a coin to decide between starting a casserole café or a beauty boutique. They then opened a small beauty boutique in San Francisco called, ‘The Face Place.’
1997
After success in the U.S. Benefit then launched internationally with a counter in Harrods, London. Not long after, the website launched.
1991
Benefit opened up its first U.S. department store counter in Henri Bendel, New York City.
2003
Benefit then opened their first Brow Bar at Macy’s, Union Square, San Francisco. A few years later, Jean and Jane’s daughters Maggie and Annie joined the company.
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1990
The product catalogue was developed and they began to focus on department store distribution. Shortly after; ‘The Face Place’ was renamed as Benefit Cosmetics.
1980
The store moved to downtown San Francisco and with this move came the launch of their lip plumping product, ‘lip-plump.’
2001
1999
Benefit Launched a bath and boudoir line.
LMVH acquired Benefit on September 14th.
2017
After making a world record, of 382 brow waxes in 8 hours, in 2012, Benefit then beat their own Guinness World Record, for charity over in Australia. We completed 435 waxes in 8 hours! Phew!! And to date; Benefit has Beauty Bars in stores, Sephora, Debenhams, Boots and John Lewis.
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The Benefit Brand Mission: Our mission is to be able to, ‘Turn every gal’s beauty frown upside down.’ Julie Bell, Executive Vice-President of Global Marketing. “We aim to provide all the gals out there with quick beauty fixes, and easy to use, one-of-a-kind products that girls of all different types of beauty, origins and styles can fall in love with. Our innovative formulae is something we take seriously, and our products are made to enhance the daily lives of our Benefit Women, making them feel confident and glamourous, whilst maintaining the fun, girly and quirky brand persona.”
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The Benefit Vision: The Benefit Vision is to not only be the Leading Cosmetics Brand for instant beauty remedies, but for beauty services too. We are the only prestige cosmetics company that offer a range of beauty services from waxing and tinting, to spray tanning and lashes and we want to maintain this respectable status. Brows are something that Benefit believes are at the very core of our brand, and we aim to be the number one cosmetics brand for these products. Girls all over the world rely on Benefit for a fun make-over experience, and Benefit want to honour this reliance by being there for our consumers and supporting women worldwide. With our ‘Bold is Beautiful’ programme, we want to empower and better the lives of our Benefit Girls by supporting a number of different charities, to spread our ‘Look Good, Feel Good’ approach.
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Our Brand Values: Fun – Here at Benefit we believe that taking care of ourselves should be
fun and enjoyable. Our playful and fun packaging, reminds our girls to have fun with beauty, and to laugh-out-loud as they go about their daily beauty routine. We believe that laughter is the best cosmetic, and we share this philosophy with not only our consumers, but our employees, and girls all around the world too. A typical day at Benefit is never finished without a day full of beauty banter, laughter and an exciting variety of jobs to complete. Right through from our employees, to our packaging, our glamorous sense of humour will not go unnoticed, and our brand would be nothing without it!
Unique - Whilst not only being the Number One cosmetic company at
providing quick beauty fixes, we are also the only luxury beauty brand to offer services to make a woman feel good on the inside and out. We go the extra mile here at benefit and will do (almost) anything to make our Gals feel Beautiful. Brow waxing, spray tanning, tinting and lashes, is what sets us apart from the rest, meaning that our brand really is one-of-a-kind.
Innovative – Whilst we pride ourselves on the ability to make girls smile
and laugh, we also concentrate on making sure the formulae we deliver are of an unbeatable quality. At Benefit we strive to create beauty products that are significantly easier to use than other. Along with being easy, we aim to break boundaries with our exciting new products by constantly evolving, developing and changing the formulae being created.
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Quality – Quality is at the heart of our brand at Benefit. We think it is
important to keep up the quality of our products whilst being creative and innovative at the same time. Maintaining the quality of girl power, love and humour throughout our brand and products is also essential when branching out into new products and markets, this keeps our Benefit Gals happy!
Empowering – Benefit are here to make girls, no matter what their
origin, style and look is, more confident. We go the extra mile to brighten a girl’s day, whether that be providing her with concealer to cover up that annoying blemish or giving her a glamorous spray tan that makes her friends wonder where she went for her vaycay. Whilst our beauty products and services empower our wonderful consumers, our charities aim to create the same feeling within girls who are struggling in challenging locations, circumstances and lifestyles.
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Brand Positioning. We are currently the only luxury cosmetics company that offers a wide range of beauty services in store. This sets us ahead of our competitors as we go the extra mile for our consumers. We pride ourselves on not only the quality of our products, but our customer service and desire to help girls all over the world. Whether that be giving them the brows they deserve, or giving them a head-turning glow. Like our competitors, the quality of our makeup is at the core of our business, however we deliver our high quality, luxurious cosmetics, in an easy-to-use, simplistic formula. Girls of all different levels of talent and skill can enjoy our products, whether they’re a YouTube sensation beauty vlogger, a freelance makeup artist, or simply looking to make themselves feel glam for the day.
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Brand Positioning Map.
Our Brand Guidlines.
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Tone Of Voice
Our tone of voice we use here at Benefit, is one that girls can trust. We are here as our benebabes’ best friend, providing her with quick-fix, reliable beauty products, with a fun and friendly tone enabling us to build up a friendship with them. We like to think that the beauty ritual each girl executes on a daily basis can be made a more fun and enjoyable when using Benefit cosmetics. Our funny slogans, and witty product names carry our philosophy that, ‘laughter is the best cosmetic.’ We sustain this friendly, fun energy right across our product line, packaging, website, customer service and store appearance.
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The Benfit Logo Serif Font: classic, traditional and neat. Easy to recognise and legible.
‘San Francisco’ must always be at the left side of the logo, in the font, ‘P22 Underground’ in petite caps.
Font: Ratio Modern, Regular.
The head of the ‘f’ must always replace the dot in the letter ‘i.’
Benefit The kerning of the word should be optically correct and even.
The ‘f’ must always be in italics, with the tail of the ‘f’ in the same shape as the head.
Must ALWAYS be in lowercase lettering. This maitains the simplistic persona of our brand.
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Tag Lines and Slogans Our tag lines at Benefit carry on our wonderful legacy. (A girl’s smile is the best thing that she can wear and here at benefit, it’s our job to enhance it!) Making our benebabes feel good is something we know how to do. Our humorous and whimsical slogans are there to make every girl out there feel confident in herself and realise there is more to beauty than just a tube of mascara. Our slogans are encouraging our gals to go out, have fun, be confident and let their hair down with their benefit attitude.
‘Grabbing Life By The Giggles.’ ‘Laughter Is The Best Cosmetic...So Grin And Wear It.’
‘Benhind Every Strong Brow Is An Even Stronger Woman.’
‘Give And Get Gorgeous.’
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Fonts.
For our logo: Ratio Modern font is used. This font is serif, meaning it is classic, reliable, and very easy to read.
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
For our website headings and subtitles: SignPainter HouseScript
font is used. This is a feminine and decorative script font. It illustrates the friendly and fun feel to the brand.
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
For the text on our website: P22Underground font is used in petite
caps, in ‘light’. This font keeps the main body text simple, legible and minimalistic, illustrating the simplicity of our makeup products and brand ethos.
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
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We vary the fonts that we use between different products and packaging. For our brow products we use the font, ‘Romeo MediumCondensed’ in Capital lettering, and with a drop shadow. This gives our brow products a fun, comic book look, whilst also being striking and memorable.
For other products like our ‘Roller Lash Mascara’, we use ‘Luxus Brut’, a serif font, which looks handwritten. This is a very feminine font and gives our roller lash product the elegant look that it deserves!
Across our products there is a vast collection of font styles. This is to give each and every one of our products a different personality, and keeps our brand fresh, fun and unpredictable.
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Colour.
For our branding we use a colour palette which is made up of a variety of different shades of peach and pink tones. This keeps our website, packaging, social media, store and counter’s appearance coherent and easily recognised. The 6 main colours used are: Cosmetic White R = 255, G = 255, B = 255 C = 0%, M = 0%, Y = 0%, K = 0%
Charcoal Grey R = 68, G = 68, B = 68 C = 64%, M = 55%, Y = 52%, K = 54%
Vibrant Coral R = 255, G = 115, B = 128 C = 0%, M = 68%, Y = 35%, K = 0%
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Pretty Pink R = 249, G = 158,, B = 161 C = 0%, M = 50%, Y = 26%, K = 0%
Beautifully Bare R = 241, G = 197, B = 191 C = 4%, M = 29%, Y = 21%, K = 0%
Peach Blush R = 255, G = 158, B = 152 C = 0%, M = 50%, Y = 32%, K = 0%
Alongside these pink and peach shades, charcoal and white are used. This is to keep a classic and simple colour palette to our brand rather than involving a variety of different colours and textures. However, the packaging of our benefit cosmetics does not necessarily adhere to this colour palette. We choose to differentiate our choice of colours depending on the product and the style of packaging that is created.
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Image Guidelines.
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Advertisements. For advertisements, Benefit choose to take a more fun, entertaining approach. With our tag line being, ‘Laughter is the best cosmetic,’ we like to illustrate this with our advertisements, by making them fun to look at and enjoyable to read. Our online and print advertisements maintain a retro, pin-up style throughout, we aim to produce a very feminine characterised image that will appeal to all of our Benebabes.
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Website.
For our website we use photographs of our beautiful Benefit girls wearing our cosmetics, who come from a diverse range of backgrounds and cultures. We choose to display more natural makeup looks on our page to show what Benefit is all about; enhancing a girl’s natural features. However, we still like to keep these photographs fun and light-hearted.
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Beauty Shots. The beauty shots of our products on our website are always on a plain white background and show the product itself and the packaging in which it comes. These are clear, clean photographs that give a high-quality picture of what the product is and how it is packaged.
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Social Media. Our social media images, on instagram, are relatable, stylish and fun. They depict what our brand is all about. These images are clear and follow the same colour theme as our website, sustaining the same feminine character of our brand that is apparent in other images used on our website, on our print advertisments and in our stores.
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Products and Services.
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Our Products:
Our range of award winning products are one-of-a-kind, fun, quick and easy to use, whilst still maintaining a glamorous quality.
Brows:
Face:
Skin Care:
Brow Gel Brow Pencils Brow Tools and Kits Brow Heroes
Contouring Blush Bronzer Cheek Stain Concealer Face Powder Face Primer Foundation Highlighter
Cleanser Eye Care Makeup Remover Moisturiser Targeted Skin Care
Eyes:
Lips:
Mascara Eyeliner Eyeshadow Eyeshadow Palettes Eye Primer False Eyelashes
Lipstick Lip Gloss Lip Stain
Makeup Accessories: Makeup Bags Tools and Brushes
Makeup Kits: Body Care: Beauty Kits Eye Kits Value Sets
Body Care Perfume
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Our Services:
We provide a wide variety of confidence boosting and relaxing services for all of our Benebabes to enjoy.
Body Wax:
Facial Wax:
Bikini Half Leg Full Leg Under Arm Half Arm Full Arm ‘Smooth Sally’ Package Bikini Hot Wax
Brow Arch and Lip Wax Lip Wax Chin Wax Lip and Chin Wax Sides Wax Full Face Wax
Brows:
Lashes:
The Benefit Brow Arch Brow Arch and Brow Tint Brow Tint Brow Tweeze
Strip Lash With Application Lash Tint Lash and Brow Tint Lash Tint With Brow Arch Lash and Brow Tint with Arch
Spray Tan: Full Body Half Body Face Only
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The Benefit Bestsellers:
Gimme Brow+
BADgal Bang
Volumising Eyebrow Gel £20.50
Volumising Mascara £21.50
Hoola Bronzer
The POREfessional
Bronzing Powder £25.50
Face Primer £27.50
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Hello Flawless Oxygen Wow
GALifornia
Boi-ing Concealer
Goof Proof
Brightening Makeup £30.00
Blusher £25.50
Industrial Strength £17.50
Eyebrow Pencil £20.50
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Our Store Requirements.
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When walking into our Benefit Boutiques or Beauty Bars in a department store like Selfridges, you will always see one of our gorgeous beauty whizz’s behind the counter in her perfectly pink pinny, and black benefit uniform. We are more than happy to help you find exactly what you are looking for, even if you don’t know what that is yet. Our customers will not leave our beauty bar, empty handed, disheartened or with a negative view of our brand.
Our store appearance is very much corresponsive to our online look. You guessed it, we’re pink from head to toe! We have retro wallpaper and furniture in our boutique to maintain the original look from our very first beauty boutique; ‘The Face Place’, back in San Francisco. ‘The boutiques evoke a local neighbourhood style with lamps, wallpaper stripes, and framed pictures on walls and an “expect the unexpected” style’ (Farely, 2011).
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The Consumer.
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Our Consumers.
Our Benebabes are our favourite gals in the whole wide world, and our priority here at Benefit is to find out exactly who they are, what they want and what made them choose us!
Who are our Benebabes? Our core customers are our gorgeous females, statistically aged between 20 – 45. However, ‘Benefit appeals to women (and some men) of all ages, whether they’re 15 or 85.’ (Farely, 2011). They are; working adults with a higher disposable income, students, beauty bloggers and vloggers, even younger girls who are still at school!
What do our gals want? All our gorgeous gals out there, looking for a quick-fix for their beauty dilemmas, turn to us and we save the day. No matter what age they are, there is always something Benefit can help them with, whether that is the dark grey circles under their eyes, an annoying blemish that’s been on their forehead for what feels like forever, or a quick upper lip wax to get rid of those unsightly hairs. Our gals want luxury and convenience. They want to be able to feel glamorous and luxurious, and to know that the makeup in which they are wearing is of a high quality. Our consumers also want this in an easy-to-apply, quick to use formula that comes in a compact case, easily slippedninto a handbag.
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Why Benefit? Benefit realise that just because women want ease, convenience and speed in their beauty solutions, it doesn’t mean they have to be of a lesser quality, and cheaply made. We provide our consumers with a cosmetics line that can be quick, but also feels luxurious and glamorous to use. Our beauty services for our gals are confidence boosting, relaxing and reliable. It allows our Benebabes to get out of the house, work or college and escape to an oasis of calm where their mind can wander and revitalise for half an hour.
Where? We make sure we can reach our Benebabes, wherever they may need us, whether that’s far out in the country side, or in the middle of a huge, cosmopolitan city. We channel our distribution through different networks; our boutiques, department stores, and online website.
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Benefit Cosmetics have 3 core types of consumers.
We have our 13-17 year old category, who are girls that are in full time education at school, and would love nothing more than a fancy Benefit Gift Set from their mum or bestie for their Birthday! We also have our young women who are usually on an apprentice wage, or still studying at university. These girls watch our vloggers daily and spend their money on luxuries like our Eyebrow Gels and Bronzers. They also love to have a girly trip to our stalls and boutiques to have their eyebrows done. Our third core consumer is the young and middle aged woman who works full time and has a higher disposable income. They enjoy buying our beauty products regularly, to put in their handbag for work, and coming for a cheeky bikini wax before a nice vaycay somewhere hot!
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Pen Portraits.
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Consumer 1 “13-17 year old category, who are girls that are in full time education at school, and would love nothing more than a fancy Benefit Gift Set from their mum or bestie for their Birthday!�
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Consumer 2 “Young women who are usually on an apprentice wage, or still studying at university. These girls watch our vloggers daily and spend their money on luxuries like our Eyebrow Gels and Bronzers. They also love to have a girly trip to our stalls and boutiques to have their eyebrows done.�
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Consumer 3 “Young and middle aged women who work full time and have a higher disposable income. They enjoy buying our beauty products regularly, to put in their handbag for work, and coming for a cheeky bikini wax before a nice vaycay somewhere hot!�
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CSR, Sustainability & Ethics.
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Bold Is Beautiful. Here at Benefit, we do more than make-overs for our gals
All over the world, including in the UK and the USA, we support a number of different charities that empower women in a variety of different situations of need with our, ‘Bold Is Beautiful’ project. These charities include, Dress For Success, GDI – Girl Develop It, Girls inc., Look Good Feel Better, Step Up and The Princess Project. All of these charities target women in need, of all different ages. It supports educating girls in college, helping women suffering with cancer, and women seeking financial independence. Benefit donate to these charities regularly as we pride ourselves on empowering women, and making girls feel good about themselves. For one month per year, we launch the, ‘Bold Is Beautiful Campaign.’ For every single brow wax that happens in that month, 100% of profits go directly to our charities. Benefit UK also have a pink pop up charity shop that we send off on a big long girly tour of the UK. This charity shop sells clothing that is donated by celebrities, influencers, bloggers and customers, in order to make money for our charities. How fabulous is that?!
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Animal Testing.
Here at Benefit, we do not test our products on animals. ‘Since 1989, the Perfumes & Cosmetics companies of LVMH group (including Benefit Cosmetics) have not performed any tests on animals for our products - this was implemented long before the 2013 official ban set by the European Union.’ (Benefit Cosmetics LTD, 2018) We are devoted to eliminating the testing of cosmetics on animals and helping to develop other alternative methods to test cosmetics through supporting, ‘Fund for Alternatives to Animal Testing,’ in the United States. ‘We also actively participate in validation studies of new alternative tests in the framework of the European cosmetics association, Cosmetics Europe. We are one of only a few companies to have invested in creating our own internal department to test raw materials and ingredients to further ensure the quality of our products’ (Benefit Cosmetics LTD, 2018).
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Sustainability. At Benefit, we take extra care when designing the packaging of our products. We use cardboard for all packaging which is very widely recyclable and easy to dispose of in a safe way that will not harm the environment nor contribute towards landfill. We also use plastic and glass for the bottles and containers of our products, so our Gals can recycle these also. Therefore, we are helping to contribute to a sustainable environment for our future Benebabes to live in!
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Communication Guidelines & Connecting With Customers.
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The BeneBlog. Our Benefit blog page on our website is one of the key ways that our brand connects with our consumers. We keep them updated with everything new and exciting that Benefit is doing using this blog. For example, our PR events, product launches, tips, tricks and beauty hacks with Benefit products and quick how-to’s are all uploaded onto this blog. This blog is updated regularly and maintains an exciting fun energy for our readers to become involved with; creating consumer relationships with the brand and brand loyalty.
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YouTube.
Benefit also uses YouTube to communicate with the public. This is where we upload tutorials, advertisements, fun makeup challenges and short films about Benefit. We also use YouTube to connect with popular, famous beauty vloggers. We send them our cosmetics and they show the public how to wear them and give honest reviews. These are the gals (and guys) that get to try out our brand-new products first and can tell their subscribers just how excited they are about them! We connect with youtubers all over the world, from Australia, to the USA, and UK. We recently held a huge launch party for our YouTube gals in the Maldives! Here, we introduced them to our amazing new BAD gal BANG mascara, treated them to a range of different Maldives experiences and a whole load of Benefit goodies they could share on their channels!
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Our ‘Wow Brows’ App. At benefit we also like to recognise consumer loyalty to our brand. We recently launched our ‘Benefit Wow Brows App’ where, with every brow treatment a paying customer receives, they receive a stamp, and can unlock and redeem free treatments along the way like a free tint, or a free brow product. Our paying customers have to have this app in order to receive these loyalty rewards. On this app our gals can book their appointments and refer friends to Benefit which also reaps rewards.
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PR Stunts & Competitions. Benefit also love to do PR stunts and competitions! Competitions are important to us because we feel it is necessary to treat our gorgeous gals to once in a lifetime experiences, treats and excursions. We like to spread the Benefit buzz all over the world, taking our girls International with trips to win, and different competitions to enter in a variety of different countries. In the UK we had an Extreme Brow Bar that was launched 65ft in the air, along the River Thames in London! Our babes that were brave enough to head on up there received a complimentary brow service of their choice and £100 worth of our amazing brow products! That’s right, £100’s worth!!!
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Our Benefit Brow Mobile also did a tour of the UK, bringing fleeky brows to wherever you need them‌on wheels! We ran a competition where one of our Benebabes could win the chance for the Brow Mobile to turn up to their work place, their home, an occasion or an event of their choice. The winners also received personalised brow tutorials held in the van, a series of different brow treatments, and a hamper filled to the top of Benefit goodies!
We also created our very own Benefayre in order to raise charity for Refuges. ‘We at Benefit love having a good time, and what better way to have good old-fashioned summer fun, than a fayre!’ (Benefit, 2017)
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Ethics Clause I confirm that this work has gained ethical approval and that we have faithfully observed the terms of approval in the conduct of this project. Signed ....................................................... Date ..............................
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