Joseph Basham works as Science, Communications and Partnership Engagement Manager at Deciem, the parent company of The Ordinary, supporting the communication of science within relation to its products and the skin.
— We’ve always been a very science-driven company. My job is about finding the right balance between communicating the science without being too technical, to educating but ensuring it’s accessible to as many people as possible. I started in our retail locations, the stores — it gives you insight into what your consumers are looking for.
One of the more memorable campaigns presented by The Ordinary was last year’s Everything is chemicals.
— We felt that there was quite a movement in the beauty industry towards chemophobia, the fear of chemicals. So, we wanted to bring the science and the true, full story to the forefront. The campaign was about bringing the message that everything is a chemical and so is the ingredients that are going to your beauty products as well as the packaging. And, they’re not something to be scared of. We often look at the ingredient and say, ’Oh, this or that is really bad for you.’ The reality is that most ingredients and chemicals can be bad for you at certain levels. We always talk about ’the dose being the poison’. The level of the ingredients that you’re using is very important. Things like water can be very detrimental if you consume too much of it. It’s about looking at the bigger picture and how thee ingredients interact as a whole.
— Particularly in Europe, we have very strong cosmetics legislation — in fact, one of the strongest in the world — to the point where a lot of markets adopt its EU legislation. So cosmetics in the EU and in other jurisdictions around the world are safe as we know. The EU is constantly looking at new legislation and reassessing ingredients to make sure that they are as safe as possible for consumers.
What else do you think about the EU legislation?
— On the whole, the EU does a really good job of balancing the two sides of things. One thing I really appreciate is that they apply the precautionary principle. If there is any doubt, leave it out. This is very important because the second you start to have any concerns, you don’t necessarily need that ingredient in cosmetics. There are some where it’s very challenging to replace but as technology advances so much, we have alternatives that might be safer or more suitable for a specific formula.
Better safe than sorry. And now we will see new US regulations as well for the first time in more than 80 years.
—Yes, that’s going to be really exciting.I think there’s been quite a disparity between the US and other markets for quite some time — that extra level of safety ensures that consumers are receiving the maximum level of protection they possibly can.
If you look at your job. Is it challenging?
— We have a bit of a balance. Sometimes I can be stuck in research for half a day and get completely lost in it and love it, and that part of things brings me a lot of joy. And then on the other side of things, we have to sometimes put out fires — metaphorical fires — in certain areas, which can be quite a challenge. Also, how you approach topics because, like I said, it’s about communicating science in a way that’s clear to consumers and sometimes very complex topics can be quite difficult to explain, particularly when there’s a lot of fear or concerns around them. Communicating that in the right way is really important to make sure you educate consumers without concerning them even more.
And the end consumers are more knowledgeable than ever. How do you work with educating?
— We ensure that our communication on the science is clear and simple to understand for those consumers who need that. But we also go into the more complex and technical aspects of things, where we feel that the consumer is able and has the need and thirst to absorb it. We’re able to do a wide range of things from very quick and simple social media posts to producing white papers and even technical reports of some of the research that we do.
And you’re a global brand. So different markets are also different in knowledge and maturity.
— Yes. We’ve been looking at expansion into new regions and it’s very much a challenge because some markets work entirely differently to the European Union. Having to adapt to that, to go into that new market, has been quite challenging, but also good fun.
How have you seen the market and the brand change throughout your years there?
— Hugely. When I got into cosmetics, the beauty industry had a lot of movement to go. Since I’ve been working within The Ordinary, we’ve worked hard to get the message out, not just from our brands, but to have that wider conversation in the industry. We always say that our brand was set up to try and change the beauty industry. We didn’t just want to sell skincare. We wanted to try and change the conversation that consumers were having about their products.
Do you think you’ve succeeded? Or is it an ongoing project?
— I would like to think so. We can follow the trends and we can see the data. We can’t directly see that it’s related to us but we can definitely see that there’s been a movement towards understanding ingredients and consumers looking for specific ingredients in skincare. We’ve seen a lot more consumers looking for ingredient-based formulas as opposed to just concern-led ones. That’s been an exciting journey to see and we’ve worked closely with influencers, press, and industry leaders to push that conversation moving forward.
Quite a dramatic change, in consumer behaviour as well, post-pandemic. And you’ve also been a leader in terms of transparency, so you’ve got to have an advantage in this.
— Yes. Covid had quite a huge impact on the beauty industry. It changed a lot of ways that consumers approach their beauty. We now see a lot of them starting to now use less and less products. You have consumers who want to still use 4-6 steps in their regimen, but also those who just want to pick up one product and have that simple application of one or two steps. So, that’s where our innovation is heading, in order to appeal to them as well.
You mentioned data. What are the takeaways in consumer behaviour based on your data?
— One of the really interesting things that we’re seeing — and it’s happening in every industry — is the transition to a lot more online-based. On that point, particularly with social media, what we’re noticing is that attention span is dramatically decreasing to the point where now, with a lot of consumers, you have 12 seconds to capture their attention. So our direction has been to ensure that we’re meeting those consumers and that our content is appealing to them, Basham shares. He continues:
— I always reference our TikTok channel, which has been phenomenally successful. Sometimes too successful when we’ve done pop-up events before though there’s never so much thing as too much success, I suppose. But it’s been incredible to try and capture that new audience that is more and more looking for short snappy sound bites. That’s been an interesting adjustment.
What other lessons learned do you have from your TikTok channel in terms of communication?
— I think one of the challenging things that we’ve got is that TikTok is very much directed towards a younger audience. We do try to be quite careful in what we’re communicating on our TikTok channels. We are moving towards a place where we want to try and educate consumers a lot more, particularly our younger ones. There’s a huge conversation happening right now about very young consumers starting to use very strong active ingredients. And we’re working on helping to how we tell that story because there are a lot of challenges in that space. Keep your eyes out — we’ll be going to taking a little bit of time to make sure we get it right.
A new campaign is in the making.
— Yes.
If you look at science, what are you curious about this year?
—What’s really exciting, and we did research on this recently, is that peptides are starting to have quite a big surge in the industry. It’s more and more what consumers are looking for in terms of ingredients. And what we’re seeing now is new ways of approaching it. Peptides being signalling molecules can be crafted to do whatever you want them to do, depending on the sequence of the amino acids inside that help to form the molecules. Some companies are also using AI. So whereas molecules would be researched and then investigated, or they would be built out based on the science, now we can get AI to screen hundreds if not thousands thousands of different ingredients and pick out things that we might have never noticed with the human eye. This ability to excel the research in certain areas, I’m excited to see where that goes.
We’ve only scratched the surface?
—Exactly.
So AI may enhance the effect of peptides and other ingredients?
— Yes, that’s what we hope for. That it’s going to take it to the next level in terms of condensing these huge research aspects down into much smaller spaces over a number more ingredients. It gives you the opportunity to find the incredible peptides.
— If you look at ChatGPT, it will obviously continue to get better. But I don’t think we’re quite at that space yet, particularly within science communications of cosmetics, where an AI is able to do it better than humans. It might be able to do it well with a bit of human tweaking but all of our content is still written by humans and that kind of conversation is always fact-checked. Everything that we write is based on publicly available papers or research that’s been done in-house or from other sources. We always try to ensure that that’s the base of what we’re building from.
Do you think AI is such a game changer for the beauty industry as everyone keeps saying?
— I think it’s gonna be interesting to see how it progresses. I don’t really wanna speak too soon. I think it will have a massive impact. And I think the biggest place that will have an impact is gonna be in beauty tools and technology. But I do think there’s a huge place for it within the active ingredient and innovation of beauty product space as well.