We are thrilled to have been a part of this year’s Glossy Beauty and Wellness Summit, a forum where industry leaders from L’Oreal, DIOR, Sephora, MAC, and more, come together to exchange ideas, debut product innovations, and discuss emerging strategies and trends. The two and half day event, hosted at the Ritz Carlton Santa Barbara, CA, was filled with insightful keynotes, engaging workshops, beauty samples, and endless networking opportunities. In addition to the typical topics around increasing revenue and distribution, “elevating social engagement experiences” and “AI” seemed to be popular discussions throughout the event.
ZEALS.ai had the pleasure of being a sponsor and hosting this year’s 360 workshop at the summit. This not only provided us with a great opportunity to build some brand and product awareness, but also to gain a better understanding the common challenges and opportunities of leveraging social media to drive customer engagement and sales for beauty products and services. The brands we had the pleasure of speaking with are all looking for new ways to cut through the noise, better enable influencers, and create more personalized customer experiences across the web and social media. These may all seem like challenges, but looking at them from a ‘glass half full’ perspective, they are in fact opportunities to drive exponential growth at a greater velocity.
As suggested by Forbes’ Top Social Media Statistics and Trends of 2023, platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, etc.. will continue to grow in number of users (5.89 billion by 2027), influence sales, and increase brand engagement. The looming question among the marketers, digital strategists, and social media managers we engaged with at the event is, “what else can we do to drive more meaningful engagement and sales on social media?”
As hosts of this year’s 360 workshop, we presented a forum for a select group of brands to dive into deeper discussions about their current social media strategies and outlook. The focus of the workshop was to provide a better understanding of how brands such as Shiseido and MAC are currently leveraging social chat commerce to drive higher conversions and increase brand engagement across Facebook, Instagram and LINE.
We provided a short presentation, an interactive demo of a social chat experience we built on instagram (using the ZEALS.ai platform), and concluded with a series of discussions around the technology, implementation and GenAI capabilities that power the chat experiences. Some of the participants were already experimenting with social chat commerce, while others are only learning about it for the very first time. However, the general interest around AI-driven personalizations and product recommendations stirred up even more conversations that lasted beyond the workshop.
It was a more than pleasant experience interacting with the various brands and industry leaders at this year’s Glossy Summit, and we are happy to have been part of the event. We look forward to continuing our support for the community and participating in next year’s summit.
