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Driving Cosmetics & Personal Care Growth with AI Product Development and Market Intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming a rapidly ubiquitous tech transforming the world as we know it. Across nearly all industries – including cosmetics and personal care – businesses harness AI to enhance their agility and capabilities and drive success. Already we’re seeing a boost in innovation, particularly in regards to personalization, with AI-powered tailored product recommendations drawn from online quizzes and even facial scans; consumers are getting increasingly curated experiences.
However, there are many other challenges beyond driving innovation that cosmetics and personal care companies are facing when it comes to product development. The biggest? Speed and accuracy.
Developing products requires an immense amount of data that can quickly become unmanageable, causing bottlenecks. This only worsens the pressure of the industry’s frenetic pace that is already an uphill battle for companies to contend with, all whilst keeping consumers’ health and safety as priority number one.
Streamlining the go-to-market process with AI product development is vital for brands, retailers and manufacturers to successfully keep pace whilst navigating high levels of complexity and stringent compliance standards. Now, let’s first explore some of the key challenges cosmetics and personal care companies are navigating.
Keeping up with consumer demands and trend forecasting with AI product development
Staying on trend or in-tune with consumer beauty trends means fast turn-around time for new launches of a variety of products across different markets. This requires incredible efficiency and infallible accuracy to launch the right products for the right markets at the perfect time. Despite the rise of increasingly international cosmetics trends thanks to the popularity of social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, these same platforms have also given way to microtrends that squeeze product development timelines to a breaking point and can also be highly unpredictable.
But it’s not just new products that consumers want. From calls for reduced packaging and more plant-conscious materials to rejecting animal testing, consumer mindset shifts towards sustainable and ethical beauty are forcing cosmetics and personal care companies to not only assess what they make but how they make it and make positive changes to meet demands fast.
Managing overwhelming amounts of data
Developing products means a lot of data management across all teams. Formulation teams trawl through hefty ingredient libraries and back catalogues filled with reams of past product formulations while quality testing and compliance teams navigate regulatory documents, test results, and ingredient blacklists that vary by market. Having these huge data sets is, of course, essential, but processing and analyzing them as a manual task – especially without an existing technology foundation, meaning potentially thousands of spreadsheets and disparate documents – means countless hours of wasted time.
Formula optimization is often a lengthy process with numerous versions and iterations, so formulation teams are faced with the dilemma of either spending long periods of time hunting through past records to find what they need or just starting from scratch and duplicating work, creating repeat formulas over and over.
For compliance teams, not only is the bottleneck of searching for information wasting valuable time, but there is also a higher risk of causing an error, which potentially puts consumer safety at risk, leading to wider and possible detrimental implications. For product management and merchandising teams, working with mountains of sales and market data impedes their ability to make fast and smart product go-to-market related decisions, such as conducting beauty price comparison and ensuring competitive pricing.
Upholding rigorous compliance and testing standards against the clock
Consumer safety is critical to cosmetics and personal care, which means lengthy testing times that can require multiple iterations. Quality control and compliance teams are therefore constantly under pressure to maximize their efficiency without impacting the rigorous standards required.
Blending AI into your tech foundation
AI is a powerful tool that streamlines product development to maximize efficiency. Capable of processing and analyzing huge swathes of data faster than multiple people could at once, AI can potentially free up vital time spent on manual tasks so teams can focus on making quicker and more accurate data-driven decisions.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping the cosmetics and personal care industry in the UK, projected to reach a market value of $16.78 billion in 2024, growing at an annual rate of 2.06%. As British consumers increasingly demand personalized and sustainable products, AI technology is helping brands to innovate and streamline product development to keep up with evolving trends. By leveraging AI for trend forecasting and identifying consumer insights, brands can stay ahead of emerging trends and maintain their competitive edge.
Choosing the right AI may feel like a challenge. Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) platforms like Centric PLM™ combine powerful market intelligence software built on a market-driven approach with AI options tailored specifically for cosmetic and personal care brands, manufacturers, and retailers. This creates a truly transformational foundation that empowers cosmetics and personal care companies with competitive intelligence, allowing companies to seamlessly manage the overall product lifecycle from initial concept and formula development to packaging, quality, supplier collaboration, labelling, production, SKU rationalization, and beyond.