How should businesses prepare themselves in 2023? 

As one of the biggest industries in the world, it’s not surprising to learn that the way Beauty operates today has changed a lot in the past decade. I, Nidhima Kohli, would like to consider myself an expert when it comes to all things Beauty and Tech having built ‘My Beauty Matches’, world’s FIRST personalized beauty product recommendation and price comparison site and ‘Beauty Matching Engine’, which is an B2B Emotional AI software that personalised the full beauty shopping experience and now as the CEO of BeautyTribe, the only Beauty shopping platform offering live video consultation at scale.  

In recent years, brands have been using AI to enhance customers’ shopping experience, analyze data, boost sales, forecast trends and offer inventory-related guidance. Here are my Tech Trend Predictions in the Beauty space for 2023: 

Today, beauty is not one size fits all, and when consumers shop for new makeup products, they are seeking out personalized shopping services and recommendations from brands. The power of AR and AI technology for beauty brands lies with its ability to cater to individual consumers and their specific beauty needs. The deep learning algorithms that drive AR and AI beauty tech help brands provide mass scale personalization to consumers.  77% of consumers have chosen, recommended, or paid more for a brand that provides a personalized service or experience.  

There are a number of customizable products offered by brands online, letting customers create moisturizers or shampoos based on their needs and preferences. However, new beauty technology is set to take online personalization up a level. Here are how businesses should prepare themselves: 

  • INVEST IN AI TECH

Companies can use AI to recommend products that will align with customers’ interests and keep them engaged. By tracking customer behavior on your website, you can present your customers with products that are similar to the ones they’ve already viewed. This is an especially useful tactic for companies in the ecommerce space.  

  • SEGMENTING AUDIENCE

Advertising departments can use AI to segment audiences and create targeted campaigns. In highly competitive industries, it is extremely important to get in front of the right audience. To make marketing campaigns more effective, companies use data to decide which types of users will see which ads. AI comes into play in terms of predicting how customers will respond to specific advertisements.  

  • IMPROVING CUSTOMER SERVICE

Have you ever visited a website and been greeted by a chatbot? Chatbots are perhaps one of the most common instances of customers directly interacting with AI. From a business perspective, chatbots allow companies to streamline their customer service processes and free up employees’ time for issues that require more personalized attention. Chatbots typically use a combination of natural language processing, machine learning and AI to understand customer requests.

Chatbot technology can also help route customers to a real-life representative who is best equipped to address their questions.

  • LIVE VIRTUAL CONSULTATION

At Beauty Tribe we know customers get confused by a lot of product choices so we offer them free live video consultation by beauty professionals and in order to scale this it needed to be enabled by tech. This is 1 of the top trends we expect to see in 2023 on other platforms too.

  • SOCIAL SELLING

With companies such as Socialla raising $225m and more beautytech startups joining this trend, we expect more beauty companies jumping on this trend as selling through influencers remains a big acquisition channel for the industry.

  • BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY

As the demand for ethical products increases, the customers petition to have more information on the ingredients, production, and impact these products have on communities. We expect more companies like Seqens to develop a blockchain platform that allows customers to authenticate and receive additional information on the product through the batch number to build brand trust and fight against counterfeits. 

  • CRYPTOCURRENCIES

Cryptocurrencies are already being used as part of loyalty or reward programmes such as by Sephora.  The tokens hold value that can be used to buy things at the retailer. 

  • METAVERSE

Before buying any products, virtually experimenting with makeup and other cosmetics will continue to increase and become the norm. This will happen at both physical stores and online retailers.

  • SMART DEVICES

Our phones are now serving as a skincare expert. HiMirror, a Taiwanese company, can daily provide you with a skin analysis so you can see how well you are progressing. It can also provide bespoke beauty advice based on your skin concerns, all while the customer is sitting at home. Smart hairdryers have also been launched and we expect more BeautyTech smart tools launching.