Sephora has come out with a new campaign ad portraying the message, “We Belong to Something Beautiful” (WBTSB). This campaign is targeted towards members of the LGBTQ community. Even more specifically, it is targeted towards gender fluid and transgender people. The campaign is supposed to make everyone feel included. Typically when thinking about makeup, younger to middle-aged women come to mind as the targeted audience. With the new Sephora campaign, anyone and everyone should feel like they are welcome to shop at Sephora while being supported.
Sephora is trying to change what is acceptable in today’s society and include everyone. They made a whole campaign video celebrating the transgender/nonbinary beauty community, individuality and celebrating the importance of being seen. The message Sephora believes in is championing all beauty, living with courage, and standing fearlessly together to celebrate our differences. They created a campaign to encourage this belief in inclusion, diversity, and individuality within society today.
A part of the execution for the We Belong to Something Beautiful campaign are the classes Sephora offers called “Classes for Confidence.” One of the classes known as “Bold Beauty” is for members of the transgender and non-binary communities. These classes consist of hands-on beauty lessons to help guide members of each community and boost their confidence. According to Sephora, they have hosted 1,750 classes that have reached around 50,000 people. As a result, 80% of the participants reported an increase in confidence.
Sephora joined many other beauty brands in adding inclusivity and diversity to their marketing audience. Sephora is addressing a significant problem within the beauty industry that was created by the vast inclusivity divide. For example, foundation makeup colors have always been much harder to acquire if someone were to have a darker complexion. The color ranges of foundations and concealers need to have more variation. Another example of there not being enough inclusivity is the lack of male representation in the beauty industry. Almost all beauty campaigns or advertisements are broadcasted towards women even though some of the most famous and successful beauty gurus are men. This campaign is shedding light on the issue of diversity and inclusion in the beauty industry, all while celebrating people and their individuality. Sephora is a makeup store, and they are marketing their brand and their store.
The Sephora campaign has quite a history, with trying to include diversity into the beauty industry. Last year their campaign was called Behind the Stripes, and it was focused on inclusivity just like this year’s campaign, only this year’s campaign has more focus on the nonbinary/transgender communities. As a whole, we personally really like the campaign. The visuals are done exceptionally well, all the way from all the models/actresses and actors to the camera techniques, lighting even the music is just picked so well for the advertisements. We stand with what Sephora wants to do; our only concern is that they only created it for Pride month and just wanted to join the bandwagon. The donations were one dollar for every product bought from the pride Collection, and now that Pride month is over are they finished raising money for their cause? Some people also see the problem of not having enough inclusivity in their inclusivity campaign. Many people want to see more age diversity as well as representation for the mentally disabled, and we would have to agree. It seems only right that the employees’ diversity training includes a greater variety of diversity. Those are our only significant concerns with the campaign, but we still really like what Sephora is trying to do and support them.