26 MEN’S GROOMING
as a company, we are about providing the consumer with education and information that is related to science. It’s less about feelings and intuition, more about showing that these products actually work for you – and why. We can say, in effect ‘Here’s what we analysed about your skin, here’s what we discovered and because of these things, this is the routine you should be using’.” Some brands, Parkkinen believes, have missed the opportunity to market their products along the lines of how men tend to think. Many men would be sceptical of asking beauty consultants in shops for recommendations, because they doubt that they would get objective advice. Many are simply not comfortable with asking questions at all, either because they would feel disempowered or simply would not know what questions to ask. “What we are doing with Bulldog is to
enable the male audience to access that same level of information, content and ultimately recommendations about their own skin needs and concerns in a purely digital fashion,” says Parkkinen. “They get computer vision to analyse their face and tell them objectively what it had discovered. We felt that was a value proposition that resonates particularly well with the male audience.” Of the technology companies in the space,
Revieve believes itself to be the most diverse in terms of being able to analyse different age groups and ethnicities objectively. Those who use the technology to discover new products and understand their skin better skew, broadly speaking, to a younger demographic but there are also some in their 40s and early 50s too. Digital Skincare Advisor has already been launched in Germany, Australia and the Middle East, with India next in line. Such decisions, Parkkinen says, are led essentially by the brands it works with. They tend to start in specific national or regional markets and roll the product out over time to others. It is in these markets where Bulldog saw its largest immediate opportunity. No detail is yet available about where it might go next.
Brand value Currently, with only one brand that does not have a massive range of products using Digital Skincare Advisor, one might legitimately ask what the male consumer could gain by using it. “The first thing is that it is not just about product recommendations,” says Parkkinen. “It’s about helping the male audience understand what’s going on with their skin and give them ideas about which concerns they should be treating.” Naturally, he agrees, Bulldog wants to sell
products but they are also thinking about the value the brand delivers to consumers beyond that initial transaction. Some men may not be particularly interested in the science of their skin and will just want to buy the best possible products, and they can use Revieve’s product on a retailer’s website, where they can cater to a much wider range of brands. For Bulldog specifically, Parkkinen says, “the value that you as a consumer get is not
PERSONAL CARE February 2022
“Technology offers something that engages the consumer on the journey towards better skin”
Sampo Parkkinen, CEO – Revieve
just to understand which Bulldog products you might use but to know that Bulldog can really be that thought leader who understands your skin. “The other perspective from a brand’s point
of view, particularly for a younger audience, is the need to create a relationship with the consumer. This will enable the brand to really understand their consumers and ultimately to develop products for them based on that understanding, if the consumer consents to his data being used.” Men’s skin is very different to women’s in
some ways. Whether they shave or not, men have more and thicker facial hair, for one thing. Even the proportions of different bacteria in their skin microbiomes vary from those found in women’s. This created specific technology challenges for the algorithm Revieve works with, albeit that it was developed for both a male and a female audience. “There are limitations to this kind of selfie-
based technology,” Parkkinen agrees. “The things that can discover from a skin microbiome analysis are not necessarily things that you can discover from a selfie – the camera technology is not there yet.” For example, a photo can detect general redness on the skin, but it cannot detect whether the source of this is rosacea, eczema or something else altogether. However, Revieve is working with brands
who are incorporating information about the consumer from third party sources, for example about the microbiome. Usually, this would come from the consumer taking a swab to tie into the skin analysis. Thus, such factors as the propensity of the skin to particular causes of redness can be factored in.
Skin-type challenges The variations in skin type that come with different ethnicities, not least the different ways in which skin ages, have formed another key challenge to Revieve over the past six years. And, at a more basic level, there are huge variations in the light in which the selfies are taken, the cameras used, the angle of the shot. Normalising the images for different skin tones is a massive issue that cannot always be overcome but the learnings have been fed into improving the technology. “One reason we are working with so many
heavily scientific brands is that the underlying technology has to be good enough and diverse enough to work with different skin tones,” says Parkkinen. “The user experience cannot be too cumbersome. If you have to walk around the house to find just the right spot to take the photo in, it won’t work.” Very generally – and historically - speaking, it might also have been the case that men would be more sceptical of whether a technology would really work. However, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Revieve has seen something of a mindset shift and a readiness to give new things like this a try. “Where the deployment of technology
really becomes critical is where you have these groups with a healthy scepticism. They aren’t going to give you very many opportunities. If you lose their trust in the experience, either in the result of the analysis and how you portray them, they are probably not going to come back,” he notes. The company, therefore, has been very
careful to ensure as far as it possibly can that the technology stands up to scrutiny. Looking across all the approximately 100 brands it works with, it currently finds that about 30% of the consumers that have engaged with the AI Skincare Advisor use it on a month-to- month basis. This, to Parkkinen, suggests that “we have retained a certain level of trust with the consumer”.
PC
www.personalcaremagazine.com
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