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How much time or money do women spend researching or test driving skincare and/ or beauty products in a month or a year?
Hello! Thanks for giving us another chance to answer your question about the time or money women spend researching skincare or beauty products. I understand from your comments on my colleague's answer that you are particularly interested in the research time.
The most useful sources I found to answer your question are The Benchmarking Company's The Pink Report 2016, Zenith Media's Media Consumption Forecast 2015, and a PR Newswire article about the typical hours shoppers spend on researching various purchases.
The short version is that based on the information I have gathered, I estimate that a woman typically spends 36 hours per year researching or trying beauty/skincare products.
Below you will find a deep dive of my findings.
METHODOLOGY
To answer your question about the research time, I tried several approaches such as the following: finding the time women spend researching before making a beauty/skincare purchase or any purchase in general, looking for women's path to beauty/skincare purchase, checking how women spend their time, finding out how often women buy skincare/beauty products, and researching the typical time shoppers spend before making different types of purchases. Though I found limited information after searching extensively through reports and articles, I was able to gather figures that enabled me to come up with estimates.
TIME WOMEN SPEND RESEARCHING SKINCARE/BEAUTY PRODUCTS
According to Slide 3 of The Pink Report 2016, The Benchmarking Company, a beauty and personal care consumer research firm, conducted an online poll of 2,747 U.S. female vetted beauty consumers (aged 18-70) during the period May to August 2016. Survey results on Slide 22 revealed that 88% of respondents spend 50% of their time online researching beauty products before making a purchase.
Meanwhile, media agency Zenith Media presented through its Media Consumption Forecast 2015 report its forecasts for the average time people spend consuming different media. As shown on page 190 of the report, the firm expects Americans to each spend an average of 199.8 minutes per day on Internet consumption this year.
Given the figures these two reports provided, we can arrive at the following estimate of the time women typically spend researching about beauty/skincare products online:
50% x 199.8 minutes/day = 99.9 minutes/day
99.9 minutes/day x 30 days/month = 2,997 minutes/month
2,997 minutes x 1 hr/60 minutes = 49.95 hours
This implies that a woman spends around 50 hours per month researching online about beauty/skincare products.
This number does not seem realistic to me, though, so I thought of a different approach.
Slide 18 of the The Pink Report shows that 41% of respondents shop for beauty products monthly while 18% shop for beauty products weekly. I assume, based on these two figures, that the frequency of buying skincare/beauty products among most women is once a month.
Though I was not able to find the average time women spend researching beauty products (online or offline) before making a purchase, I came across a PR Newswire article showing the typical research time shoppers spend before making various types of purchases.
According to this article, which was published in May 2016, the average hours spent on research range from 3 hours for a call/data plan to 26 hours for a home.
I assume, based on these figures, that research time for beauty/skincare products must be comparable or less than the research time for a data plan or a mobile phone.
Assuming that typical research time for beauty products is 3 hours too and given that most women shop for beauty monthly, then we can arrive at the following estimate:
1 purchase/month x 3 hours/purchase = 3 hours/month
3 hours/month x 12 months/year = 36 hours
We can infer then that a woman typically spends 36 hours per year researching or trying beauty/skincare products.
ADDITIONAL INSIGHTS
In my research, I learned the following additional information that might be useful to you.
1. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' American Time Use Survey, women spent an average of 0.44 hour per day in 2015 on consumer goods purchases.
"Testing is vital to today’s buyer. This could partially explain why respondents in the TABS survey reported buying fewer beauty products online last year than the year before, and has certainly helped the rise of the sample box services like Birchbox, Ipsy’s Glam Bag, Memebox, and Scentbird. It’s also one of the reasons specialty stores Ulta and Sephora have seen such success."
CONCLUSION
To wrap it up, based on the information I have gathered, I estimate that a woman typically spends 36 hours per year researching or trying beauty/skincare products.
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