Ch. 16 - Promotional Planning for a Competitive Advantage

     Lush Cosmetics' promotional strategy is to highlight their competitive advantage through the use of promotion techniques such as mass communication and especially interpersonal communication. Lush Cosmetics' competitive edge is their high quality skin products which are all vegetarian, some vegan, and mostly organic, as well as completely free of animal testing. Lush's target market of Generation-Y, vegetarians/vegans, and animal rights activists will therefore prefer this Lush's brand rather than others and eventually become loyal to the brand. Lush Cosmetics will use various channels or mediums to communicate their competitive advantage to their target consumers. Arguably one of the most important form of communication for Lush is interpersonal communication. Lush, fitting the "specialty store" definition, trains their sales associates to be extremely knowledgeable of all the products and product lines sold in the store. The sales associates also are hired based on personality rather than experience, thus they are notably sociable and friendly. Lush Cosmetics is so selective of their staff and train them very well because they rely on their sales associates to communicate with potential customers the message of their competitive edge; their products are organic, vegetarian, vegan, etc., in the most personal way possible so that they convince the potential buyer to buy.
     As discussed in a previous post, Lush Cosmetics has various social media accounts which they use in order to communicate with consumers. This is a form of mass communication in which the sender; Lush Cosmetics, encodes their message of animal testing free products through a channel; Facebook, Instagram, etc. to the receivers; the people who like/follow their social media pages to decode and interpret. Lush skillfully crafts these advertisements to be simple enough for a majority of potential buyers to interpret them. For example, they use a small black and white bunny that says animal testing on it which is evocative of the message that they don't test their products on animals.