Walgreens Boots Alliance is repositioning all of its beauty brands.
The retailer is moving all six of its brands under the umbrella of No7 Beauty Company, a new CPG company with heightened ambitions of global expansion, effective immediately.
The repositioning is a play at broadening appeal in the U.S. market, said Annie Murphy, senior vice president and global chief commercial officer of the company. “No7 is just steeped in history and has enormous credibility and trust, and when you put the other brands in the portfolio together, they equally have really strong founder stories and really strong consumer connectivity,” she said.
“It’ll give us a bigger voice in the industry, it’ll give us a bigger voice with our partners, and it’s a great platform to consolidate our position. The U.S. is a really important strategic market for us,” Murphy continued.
No7 Beauty Company has already begun its campaign for consumer awareness — and market share — Stateside. Its namesake brand expanded into Walmart last year, and body care brand Soap and Glory will also be sold via the retailer, Murphy said.
“We’re an emerging force in the U.S., but we look at our opportunities to take the brands globally, and we think we have a magic formula since these brands are highly accessible,” Murphy added.
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Although the retailer has been hoping to grow its brand business, Murphy said the recent launch of No7’s Advanced Retinol 1.5% Complex Night Concentrate broke waitlist records and gave her team the confidence to move forward. “It was about having the right insights and resources, and it was about making sure we were organized internally to really focus. That moment feels like now,” she said.
The brands are also rethinking marketing strategies, said Anisha Raghavan, chief marketing officer of No7 Beauty Company America. “Our awareness is lower in the U.S. than it is in the U.K., and platforms like TikTok are much more developed here,” she said. “For example, we’ve been selling out of our powders, which are going viral on TikTok. The way that consumers interact with the brand is a little different here, both in terms of where they see the brand showing up across retailers, as well as the channels that they’re using to connect with it.”
Personalized content has worked well for the brand, Raghavan said, crediting WBA’s first-party retail data. “Since we started using this first-party data and doing mass personalization, we’ve had an 11 times increase in No7’s return on ad spend in digital. It also impacts the way that we curate our content,” she said. “Our ability to actually target consumers on a one-to-one basis, and based on what we know they like, is miles ahead of other CPG companies.”
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