Beauty brands have to walk a fine line. They need consumers to be worried enough about their looks that they seek out enhancements and treatments and thus purchase cosmetic products. But they also have a moral and sales-related need to ensure that consumers feel happy and satisfied when thinking about the brand, its image, and its products. In this view, beauty enhancements add to people’s sense of self-worth and happiness; the products should not be marketed in a way that makes anyone feel less worthy or dissatisfied with themselves.

In pursuit of this important balance, Ulta Beauty is undertaking a new initiative called The Joy Project that aims to inject joy into the lives of its customers, a goal that is indivisible from the contributions and insights of its employees.

The idea for The Joy Project began with store associates, who reported their regular encounters with customers engaged in negative self-talk—an often involuntary mental behavior in which people criticize themselves internally. This type of thinking can be destructive and limiting, causing people to lose belief in themselves because their “inner critic” will not stop commenting, even when they try to avoid such thoughts.

When they voice such negative self-talk, it can take several forms; in an Ulta retail store for example, they might explain to a sales associate that they need concealer for their “gross skin” or lessons in contouring to hide their “big nose.” Finding appropriate, respectful, and helpful responses to such self-criticisms represents a challenging and awkward social interaction. In addition, being surrounded with negativity coming from customers might increase already stressed-out retail workers’ sense of frustration and unhappiness.

Having learned about these trends, the executives at Ulta Beauty decided to run a consumer survey, to gain more insights into the actual levels of self-esteem and joy being experienced by its customers. The results indicated that virtually everyone wanted to feel strong joy in their lives, but only 58 percent agreed that they did. When explaining what kept them from this desired feeling, 73 percent of the 5,000 survey respondents cited negative self-talk. Yet 70 percent of the participants also noted that they were unable to identify their own self-talk. The internal criticisms had grown so pervasive that people did not even realize they were frequently subjecting themselves to unnecessary, unpleasant thoughts.

By combining insights from both sales associates and consumer surveys, Ulta Beauty devised its dedicated initiative. In particular, a new training program will focus on helping sales associates recognize negative self-talk, in themselves and others. It gives them tactics for interrupting such destructive thoughts and then finding joy in other ways. Furthermore, Ulta hopes to integrate outside perspectives on this societal issue, such as by encouraging content creators to describe the tools they use to find joy with a #joyforward topic field.

The sales associates who receive training through The Joy Project ideally will serve as sort of in-store coaches for customers, by helping them recognize statements that reflect their negative inner critic and offering them responses that aim to silence that voice. Such efforts seem likely to establish a far more positive, appealing, and engaging retail environment that customers will want to visit regularly, to get a pep talk and dampen their inner critic. At the same time, it can make coming to work a positive option for retail employees, whose employer not only claims that it wants them to experience joy but also gives them tangible tools to find it.

Discussion Questions

1. If you were introducing something like The Joy Project to company shareholders, how would you justify the increased training costs, considering that the targeted outcomes are pretty difficult to quantify?
2. Other than beauty brands, what other retail sectors might benefit from efforts to ensure and increase the joy and self-esteem of its customers?

Sources: Bryan Wassel, “Ulta Beauty Is Helping Associates Find Joy. How Will the Brand Benefit?” The New York Times, October 9, 2023; “Ulta Beauty Launches The Joy Project to Ignite a Movement for the Next Generation,” Business Wire, September 25, 2023