Beauty Industry Revenue and the Impact a Celebrity Name Has

How do traditional brands such as L’Oréal, Unilever, and Estée Lauder differ from celebrity-founded brands like Kylie Cosmetics in their ability to generate and maintain revenue, especially in light of a celebrity’s influence and their social media marketing strategies? This paper looks at the revenue determinants of the top four firms within the beauty industry: L’Oréal, Unilever, Estée Lauder, and Kylie Cosmetics. The analysis shows how these firms navigate the oligopolistic cosmetics market where there are a couple dominant brands and a few emerging celebrity brands competing for revenue and market share. By using a revenue-based model approach, empirical results show how the role of variables such as income, female population, Consumer Price Index shape revenue outcomes. The findings suggest that while big firms benefit from global operations, celebrity founded brands like Kylie Cosmetics can effectively capture the attention and have short term consumer loyalty because of the brand and social media. The results from a fixed effects model showed that they do not significantly influence long term industry revenue when compared to structure factors such as market share and demographic trends. This study finds that long term factors such as female population growth and a firm’s market share are the primary drivers of revenue in the beauty industry, while short term brands such as Kylie Cosmetics launch has no statistically significant impact which highlights the importance of competitive position over promotional “hype”, yeah, the brand matters, but it is not everything.