Sephora's Epic Snaffoo

Sephora is a major beauty retailer that has been featured over and over again as a model of successful public relations and marketing organizations. In September 2014, Forbes called them out for their use of "Highly Relevant Personalized Data" to "deliver great customer experiences at every touch point" in September of 2014. This year they opened the "Innovation Lab" and unveiled new mobile marketing initiatives. Sephora pours money into public relations and marketing. The Sephora marketing model is among the most deliberate and strategic models in the world. They know their power and they know their data and THAT is why their customers are mad.

This month is historically one of the best months for retail sales around the country as the school year begins. Sephora looks like it had planned a very exciting month for its clients: a special event for VIB Rouge, a huge promotion with bonus points, fabulous epic rewards, an instagram photo contest, and the kickoff of a subscription service! When they say "despite their best efforts to predict the response," boy did they ever. They should have known.

According to "The 2015 PinkReport," an independent analysis of the Sephora shopper: "Three quarters of Sephora shoppers (75%) are beauty insider card holders. More impressively, 9 out of 10 women open their Beauty Insider emails and overwhelmingly report that they are enticed to buy a product, research reviews, browse online or take advantage of special bonus point offers... Women are responding to Sephora's targeted ads, beauty tips and "recommended for you" campaigns in force with high purchase rates, with 77% noting these communiques always (17%) or often (60%) result in a purchase." If these statistics are even close to being accurate, that means that they have more metadata regarding women's beauty purchasing practices than anyone in the world and therefore should have had a better ability to predict a response.

Sephora has run similar promotions before, and it seems that they learned from those: clients requested that they let them know that the promotion exists! Perhaps they will learn from this experience, as they have committed to do. They know they messed up. The problem is that the initial (non)responses including diversion to an instagram contest and copy & paste replies and taking a full day to release any kind of apology (posted on their own community page and not sent in the same manner as their incredibly effective marketing emails), were not particularly comforting. Now that the apology has been released, what will they do to win back the trust of their clients going forward?