Are Indian beauty brands missing out on growth due to TikTok’s ban?

TikTok means serious business for the global beauty industry. We speak to Indian beauty brands to decipher what the ban spells for them

TikTok is to beauty, what runways are to fashion. In the past few years, the application has become the trendsetting platform for beauty. A new beauty hack, ritual or practice germinates from the app on almost a daily basis. To concise the impact of TikTok on beauty, and the beauty industry, is a Sisyphean task.

TikTok pioneered the torrent of short-form content, which also happened to be perfectly tailor-made for the new-age, Gen-Z user who is extremely digital-savvy, albeit with an attention span of a gnat. A Boston Consulting Group report revealed that the short-form or bite-sized content genre, which has a global footprint worth $193 billion, enjoyed a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of a whopping 150 per cent just between 2019 and 2020. However, a 2021 Microsoft Corporation report revealed that an average netizen’s attention span has dropped to as low as 8 seconds, from 12 seconds in 2000—a dip of over 25 per cent in less than 25 years.

What catapulted the boom of beauty on TikTok was the COVID-19 pandemic, where people hewed to the app for both beauty lessons and inspiration. User data stands as a testament to the pandemic’s contribution towards strengthening the association between beauty and the pandemic. For example, by the end of 2022, 89 per cent of TikTok users have purchased a beauty product after stumbling upon it on the app. By the end of 2020, the pandemic’s debut year, TikTok became the most downloaded application globally.

TikTok’s incredible impartations on beauty

It’s fair to say that TikTok has oscillated the way brands and consumers would interact as well as switched things up when it comes to the advertising and communication of beauty brands. The snowball effect has tapped every aspect of brand building. Beauty moved under the spotlight on TikTok only during the pandemic and, unfortunately, Indian beauty brands couldn’t get a slice of the cake because the app was banned in India from June 2020 onwards. But globally, TikTok proved to be quite the game-changer, endowing a lot of beauty brands with overnight success, courtesy of ‘virality’. 

When Maybelline launched its Lash Sensational Sky High mascara in January 2021, it sold out overnight, owing to a couple of rave reviews on TikTok. For cult-favourite The Ordinary, TikTok played a catalyst in making the AHA 30% + BHA 2% Peeling Solution a bestseller with 426 per cent growth, as soon as a few videos featuring the product surfaced and went viral. To give you a better picture of its influence, the hashtag #skyhighmascara boasts 1.1 billion views while #theordinary has managed to cop 2.4 billion views. K-beauty brands Kaja Beauty and I Dew Care also successfully pivoted their businesses as their TikTok community rocketed considerably between 2019 and 2020, within a year of their TikTok debuts. Kaja joined TikTok in November 2019 and garnered a following of 1.4 million by 2020 whereas I Dew Care, who joined the app in 2019 fetched 4,10,000 followers by November 2020, revealed a Glossy Co article.

Besides becoming the ‘it’ platform for beauty brands, TikTok also transpired as a boom for a plethora of beauty content creators, make-up artists and experiment lovers. Take global make-up artist Bobbi Brown’s example; she founded the eponymous brand in 1991 and parted ways with it in 2016, following which she launched her new baby, Jones Road Cosmetics—a make-up line comprising clean and minimalistic beauty. When Brown joined TikTok, the response was almost mind-boggling. “I said, ‘Hey guys, I’m on TikTok, what do you want to hear from me?’ And people went bananas,” she toldGlossy. She’s gone on record to say that she now feels like a star after her account picked up the pace on TikTok. 

Are Indian beauty brands facing the hit?

“As an entrepreneur, I believe that having a presence on social media is crucial for any beauty brand. Without it, your target audience may struggle to discover your products or services. This is particularly true in today’s world, where a significant portion of our audience comprises the younger generation, including Gen Z and young professionals,” says Ananya Kapur, founder, Type Beauty. 

Social media presence is equally critical to Shamika Haldipurkar, founder, d’you. “Your brand’s social media is an intimate and non-formal way to communicate authentically to your audience. It’s nothing short of a storefront nowadays because a social media handle is the first touch point for a potential customer to your brand. One glance at your social media should succinctly convey to your potential customer your brand language, your brand vibe and personality,” she says. 

As founders who are proponents of social media, both Kapur and Haldipurkar sense a truancy of sorts, due to the absence of TikTok in India. Elizabeth Isaac, founder, Gunam Beauty, says, “When I talk to my founder friends such as Akash Mehta from Fable and Mane, I see how much TikTok as a platform has helped fuel their growth. For a brand such as ours, which is so dependent on social media, taking a major platform such as TikTok out of the equation is a challenge, especially when you are trying to establish yourself as a global brand.” And, Isaac misses TikTok despite having Instagram reels at her disposal. “The increasing user demand globally to take Instagram back to its reliance on photographs as opposed to videos will naturally reduce the impact of reels and videos on the platform,” she furthers.

Talking about the blank space that she notices, Haldipurkar says, “TikTok has a very powerful recommendation algorithm that is fueled by keyword search which makes it extremely easy for the audience to really search the exact content they want to consume. Furthermore, it also has very good video-editing support built into the app which allows the creator/brand to make crisp video formats end-to-end without ever leaving the app. This encourages more video creation, pushing more content into the system for the viewers. The cycle is a definite recipe for content to go viral and is hugely beneficial for creators as well as brands.”

Kapur, too, is a fan of TikTok’s algorithm that is in favour of the brand. “Its algorithm-based content discovery system would’ve allowed my brand to gain organic reach and attract potential customers who were interested in my products. If we were able to utilise the platform, I think we could have effectively expanded our brand’s reach in international markets and accelerated our growth,” cites Kapur.

Instagram and Facebook versus TikTok

While Indians don’t have access to TikTok, there’s a slew of other short-form content avenues like reels, YouTube shorts, Instagram and Facebook stories and even Snapchat. “Over 3.7 billion people across the world use our platforms Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp and their daily usage at present is the highest it’s ever been. This scale offers an opportunity for people and businesses to tell their stories and reach their audiences,” mentions a spokesperson from Meta, who emphasises the power of reels a.k.a Instagram’s endeavour to encourage short-form content.

“Reels, in particular, have been a place for India to express themselves, and it has led to the growth of the short form video format in India. Trends in India have travelled globally. Reels played across Facebook and Instagram have more than doubled over the last year. The social component of people resharing reels has grown even faster and has more than doubled on both the apps in just the last six months,” adds Meta’s representative.

“As an entrepreneur who markets through social media, I believe that Instagram and its features like reels and guides can be a viable alternative for TikTok, especially in regions where TikTok is banned and the user base has shifted to Instagram reels,” believes Kapur. “However, I also acknowledge that TikTok has built a strong brand and loyal following, making it challenging for Instagram to completely replace it. Nonetheless, Instagram has its own strengths and can provide unique benefits, such as a more established user base and better business tools, which can be leveraged to reach and engage with consumers effectively,” she furthers. 

Haldipurkar feels a bit differently. “I have hoped for a long time that Instagram can replace TikTok, but it most certainly can't,” says d’you’s founder. Elaborating on the same, she says, “Instagram’s video editing features are severely lacking which makes the user (brand or content creator) constantly exit and enter the app. This increases friction and delays content posting.The other biggest feature lacking in Instagram is a keyword-based search which is a viewer-driven feature for finding the content they want to view. All in all, there is a limitation in the virality that Instagram can generate when compared to TikTok.”

Make it big on Instagram and Facebook

Let’s get real: every social media application has its own set of hits and misses. For any business to thrive, it is critical to capitalise on the distinguishing feature of the application that is available and accessible in the region where your prime target audience resides, at least, at the nascent stage of your business. For Indian homegrown beauty brands, reels can be quite the catalyst, if explored and utilised to their fullest potential.

“Our work with hundreds of clients shows that reel advertisement placements can bring efficiencies to the campaigns regardless of objective. In fact, our internal studies showed that adding Instagram reels ad placement to existing Facebook and Instagram feeds and stories ad campaigns directionally outperformed the latter for favourability and purchase intent.” Exemplifying the same, the spokesperson continued, “For instance, adding reels delivered an incremental impact for L’Oreal Paris. When they added reels to their business-as-usual campaigns, they saw a lift in their unaided ad recall and top-of-mind awareness. The addition of reels saw lifts, especially among younger audiences aged 18 to 24 years, that too at a 10 per cent lower CPM (cost per mile/thousand) making it both effective and efficient.”

AR (augmented reality) is another tool worthy of investment. “Lakme was the first Indian brand to enable AR-try-ons on Instagram and saw strong results with nearly 18,000 try-ons in two months using the AR tool,” said the spokesperson. Soon, the L’Oréal group also followed suit to beckon traffic to the Instagram shopping feature.

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