Coty partners with Amazon to launch personal beauty assistant designed for the Echo Show

By

Arati Menon

Published
Jan 18, 2018

Beauty mega company Coty Inc. has just teamed up with Amazon to release a digital personal beauty assistant designed for the Echo Show, Amazon’s first Echo device that features a touchscreen display.
 

Christened ‘Let’s Get Ready’, the on-demand visual beauty skill offers over 2,000 unique combinations of curated looks and visual how-tos. The looks and tutorials are based on a user's individual characteristics, but dip heavily into extensive consumer insights, social listening and trend scanning.
 
Other features include syncing with a person’s Facebook calendar to actively suggest looks for upcoming events and offering the ability to add products from each look directly to a user’s Alexa shopping list.

The strategic choice of the Echo Show device and the Alexa voice service combines Coty’s focus on voice-driven beauty services with the added value of visuals, which are critical in beauty, according to the company.
 
Coty is the third largest beauty conglomerate in the world with a portfolio of iconic consumer and professional beauty brands like CoverGirl, Max Factor and Sally Hansen, as well as licensed luxury brands like Gucci, Calvin Klein, Chloe and Hugo Boss. 
 
Jason Forbes, Coty’s Chief Digital and Media Officer, said, “Digital innovation with a focus on voice and virtual assistants is a key part of our digital strategy as we aim to bring consumers frictionless beauty experiences.”
 
But Coty isn’t the only beauty company harnessing the power of a virtual assistant to reach a new generation of consumers.
 
In November, rival Estée Lauder announced an in-home beauty feature for the Google Assistant on Google Home that focuses on personalization. The collaboration with Google, the first of which is called the "Estée Lauder Nighttime Expert" app, offers skincare solutions and beauty techniques through voice-activation. The brand has announced that more customer experiences will be added to the platform in the future.
 
Emerging technology platforms, chatbots and AI are transforming the way beauty brands drive marketing, especially to millennials, in a crowded marketplace.
 
In November Shiseido announced that its subsidiary company, Shiseido Americas had acquired Giaran, a data company with technology in artificial intelligence platforms that would allow the company to transform the consumer experience.
 
Companies, like L’Oreal – an early Augmented Reality app pioneer, and Coty, are investing heavily in new technology and personalized digital experiences as an expansion of their omni-channel consumer engagement strategies.

Last year, CoverGirl (owned by Coty) tested Custom Blend, an AI-driven customization app that used a patent-pending video feature that adjusted to the lighting when a user took a selfie, to arrive at their exact skin color. The result, cutting out retailers completely, was a personalized foundation blend delivered directly to the customer’s doorstep.
 
The beauty conglomerate says it will continue to drive its brands' growth through technical disruption.
 
The Coty-Amazon Echo skill was jointly developed by Beamly, Coty’s in-house MarTech agency and OPearlo, an Amazon development partner, and will be made available in the U.K. on the Echo Show as well as all other Echo devices this month.