A Wren Says

This weekend I had the chance to take part in Sephoria, essentially a massive beauty convention put on by Sephora. I will get to my experience in the coming days. For now, let me geek out. A while back I wrote about the 4 customer roles: Seeker, User, Payer, and Buyer. Essentially, customers can occupy any or all of four roles throughout the purchase journey. A brand’s job is to cater to the needs of those roles to make a purchase more likely. As I thought back to my experience at the event, I could see how these roles played out for me.

I came into the event as a seeker. All I wanted was new information. I sought to learn, get to touch products in person, and see what might be new. But I was also the user, seeking to learn more about the functions of each of the products and how I might incorporate them into my routines. This was the role I occupied the most, but I can stretch and see how I fit into the other three as well.

I was the payer, who needed to know that my cost of admission was worth it, but I also wanted to know if all of the brands in stores were worth their costs as well. And finally, as a buyer, I wanted to know when the products would be available and came to the event to maximize my convenience to get them all.

With the return to in-person events, it was easy for me to see that Sephoria acted as a place to provide education, spur inspiration, and help attendees see greater values in the products displayed and in Sephora overall. It was largely centered on seekers and awareness, however, it had some influence for me on all of the roles.

I will be posting more on my experience at the event overall, but it is nice to see now how it fit into my customer journey and how in-person events can fit into the larger marketing strategy from a firsthand perspective.

You can read more about the roles in depth in my other posts or by looking up the source I added below.

Sheth, J. N. & Sisodia, R. S. (2019). The four A’s of marketing. In Marketing Wisdom. K. Kompell. Ed. Springer