Gen Z identity and brand relevance
MAC historically dominated younger beauty communities and was losing retention with Gen Z. As beauty and wellness consumption shifted, the business needed a deeper read on Gen Z motivations, identity signals, and cross-channel behavior.
Led the qualitative initiative to decode Gen Z behavioral drivers across MAC and competitor ecosystems, informing positioning and experience strategy.
- 20 moderated remote in-depth sessions
- Behavioral patterns synthesized into structural archetypes
- Discovery, validation, and identity expression journeys mapped
- Social and cultural influence loops analyzed across platforms
- UserTesting
- Competitor walkthroughs, user-led
- Social listening
Why MAC was losing relevance with Gen Z, and what would close the gap.
- Awareness was not the problem. MAC was recognized and its positioning felt diluted
- Brand meaning was not articulated anywhere users would look for it
- The experience did not reflect how Gen Z discovers, evaluates, and engages with beauty
- Identified the behavioral drivers shaping discovery, trust, and brand affinity
- Mapped competitor ecosystems through user-led walkthroughs to surface expectation gaps
- Defined priority experience gaps relative to Gen Z-first brands
Transparency is a trust driver, and we underperform on it
- Ingredients are buried and presented without context
- Users expect educational framing, not a compliance listing
- Ethical and health alignment influences the purchase decision
Near term, elevate ingredient visibility and filtering. Mid term, reframe ingredient transparency as educational storytelling.
Perceived ethical inconsistency erodes credibility
- Gen Z cross-verifies claims well beyond brand.com
- China market presence created confusion around cruelty-free positioning
- Perceived misalignment damaged trust
Make only claims that are fully accurate. This audience is highly educated on cruelty-free standards and globally conscious.
Gender-fluid expression is a growth opportunity
- Male and gender-fluid users increasingly experimenting with makeup
- Lip shades resonated particularly strongly
- Strong cultural alignment with MAC's historical identity
Elevate imagery reflecting this audience and integrate values-led content into the shopping flow rather than isolating it.
Who was recruited, and why
the screen mattered later
Twenty sessions on maccosmetics.com, run in the discovery phase before anything was scoped. Each participant also walked a second site they picked themselves, which is where the competitor loyalty data came from rather than from a list we handed them.
Beyond age and web expertise, the recruit filtered for politically engaged participants who were LGBTQ-identifying or active allies. That was a deliberate choice: the brand's cultural positioning is built on exactly that audience, so the sample had to be able to judge whether the positioning landed.
It turned one finding from a soft observation into a hard one. When nobody in that sample opened the brand's own values content, the problem was no longer that the audience did not care. The problem was placement.
The findings as they were
delivered to the brand
Twenty moderated sessions on maccosmetics.com, each finding paired with the screen that produced it and the opportunities it opened. Participant quotes are attributed by age, gender, and state only.
Each finding arrived with a screen recording behind it, a verbatim, and a named opportunity. That structure is what let a brand team act on qualitative work without re-litigating whether twenty sessions was enough.
From everybody, to nobody,
on the same subject
Sorted highest to lowest. The top of the list and the bottom of the list are about the same thing, which is the whole finding: unanimous demand for a brand position, and zero engagement with the place the brand had put it.
Nothing they asked for was
missing. It was unfindable,
unprioritised, or not believed.
Seven separate observations collapse into three behaviours. Grouping them this way is what made the recommendations sequence instead of compete, because each group has a different owner and a different fix.
Claims are a starting point, not evidence. All twenty wanted cruelty-free, then left the site to check, and came back having found the contradiction between the animal-testing statement and the China market. Ingredients were the same pattern: present, but formatted like a compliance notice rather than an answer.
Four in five had another tab open. Scrolling was fast enough to make video unwatchable, and several called the pages cluttered. Half said video is how they learn and not one of them played the video that was on the page. More content was making the site harder to read, not richer.
The values content existed and was not in the way of anything anyone was doing. Two in five went looking for brand purpose on their own initiative. None found their way into the section built to carry it. Meanwhile seven in ten male participants were moving toward the category with nothing addressed to them.
Because each participant chose their own second site, the study produced an unprompted list of the brands they stay loyal to and the reason in their own words. The reasons cluster into four, and three of them are things the brand under test was failing at.