Under a New Owner, Avon Cosmetics Is Embracing Social Media

Brazilian beauty conglomerate Natura became the fourth largest pure-play beauty company in the world when it completed its $2 billion acquisition of Avon Products last week. Now comes the hard part: introducing Avon’s nearly 5 million sales representatives to TikTok.

Teaching a 134-year-old new tricks

Natura’s confident Avon can regain cosmetics market share with a social-first recovery strategy that casts its salespeople as influencers, the WSJ reports.

• Natura Executive Chairman Roberto Marques told the WSJ he expects representatives to soon conduct business entirely through their smartphones.
• By becoming social media influencers, representatives can extend sales networks beyond their friends and families—the traditional sales targets—to wider swaths of customers.

The timing couldn’t be better. Natura’s attempt to crack social selling 2.0 for Avon arrives just as Instagram enhances shopping functionalities and TikTok begins experimenting with its own social commerce tools.

And Avon needs a viral hit. Through Avon’s decades-old multilevel marketing platform, representatives sold its makeup and jewelry by going door-to-door. (Gen Z readers, here’s what that looked like.) But Avon’s model suffered as we learned to ignore the doorbell when anyone flapping a brochure rang. Yearly Avon sales were on track to fall below $5 billion in 2019—half of its 2009 total.

My takeaway: After taking its sweet time joining competitors online, Natura’s Avon will have to sprint to catch up to digitally savvy rivals like e.l.f. As Vogue Business notes, brands with the best chance of capturing Gen Z should already move on from Big Social to private channels and esports.

Zoom out: The beauty industry is in flux. As customers flock to quote-unquote clean skincare products, traditional cosmetics sales have contracted in key markets including North America.