Men want their personal care and grooming products to be, well, for men

In our last article, we shared that a whopping 84% of men make their own purchases when it comes to personal care products. They’re looking primarily at how well the product works and its price when they make their decision, but they’re also looking for products that are specifically for men.

We asked men in the U.S. and U.K. who had made a purchase in this category within the last three months if they considered whether or not the personal care product was marketed as a “men’s” product. Recent purchasers said that when they shop for their own personal care products, an average of 67% purchase products marked as “men’s”. This figure drops to 50% when someone else does the shopping. 

Our study didn’t encompass the most-recognizable men’s brands, such as body wash by Old Spice and Axe, as we were looking specifically at personal care products and cosmetics, such as male grooming, moisturizer, cologne, lip balm, sunscreen and other specialty products in this category. Brands in these niche categories may need to up their “men’s” branding game to capture this powerful audience of purchasers.

This research provides a great example of how consumer insights can help personal care brands drive business decisions. Most companies are now relying on vast amounts of data to drive their business forward, which we wrote about in our recent white paper on getting the most from your data lake. But it is this critical primary consumer research that can provide a basis for moving brands into the future, answering questions about what products need to be developed to meet audience needs, how they should be packaged, to whom they should be marketed and much more.   

This kind of data is often complex. Analysis and reporting must handle  things like weighting, multi-level responses, and data relationships and comparisons. And it becomes even more valuable when combined with other critical business data streams, such as direct customer feedback, sales data, social listening and more. Using the right solution to combine all these streams of data together can help you get the big picture, but listening to what your consumer wants requires a comprehensive primary research strategy. 

Men as primary purchasers is a vastly under-studied segment, even as gender roles continue to shift. Some research has been done to show that men make purchases based more on immediate need, which explains the high percentage of male decision-makers in the personal care and cosmetics product category. Plus, this segment is growing fast overall. A GWI report earlier this year indicated that grooming and personal care products had the “fastest growing interest” among men globally, up 21% in just two years. 

With a consumer marketplace that has changed dramatically since the onset of the pandemic, brands need all the data they can get to understand their audiences. And they need the best solutions for analysis and reporting in order to truly understand the story the data is telling, and then share that story with decision-makers across the company. For personal care and cosmetics brands, bringing a larger focus on men and products that are branded and marketed specifically for men can be part of a successful equation.