In an increasingly competitive digital marketplace, cosmetics and personal care brands face mounting pressure to ensure their products are easily discoverable, clearly communicated, and accurately aligned with evolving consumer expectations.
A recent survey of over 2,000 consumers by product content optimization platform Lily AI highlighted a significant disconnect between how products are described online and how shoppers actually search for them, with industry jargon often serving as a barrier rather than a bridge to conversion.
From confusing product names and vague descriptors to overly technical language, “merchant speak” can hinder discovery and drive consumers away. The report’s data showed that 80% of shoppers have abandoned a search due to unclear or ineffective product descriptions, and 85% are willing to switch brands when they can’t find what they’re looking for.
In this CosmeticsDesign Q&A, Purva Gupta, Co-Founder & CEO at Lily AI shared insights on how artificial intelligence is helping CPG brands overcome these challenges.
CDU: The research highlights that industry jargon in product descriptions can confuse consumers and hinder product discovery. What are some common examples of “merchant speak” in the beauty and personal care industry, and how can AI help brands translate technical product details into consumer-friendly language?
Purva Gupta (PG): “Merchant speak” refers to the industry jargon, typically technical, scientific, brand-specific, or marketing-heavy language, used by both the merchant and marketing teams of retailers and brands. This insider language often doesn’t resonate with consumers and misses the boat completely in consumer search and discovery efforts.
For example, in the beauty industry, overly technical product descriptions like “features a patented bio-fermented complex that enhances epidermal renewal at the cellular level” is a common type of “merchant speak.” Does anyone search for that? And when they read it, do they even know what that means?
Another example, less on the technical front, yet more on the brand voice front…a beauty product called “Glow Play Cushiony Blush in Heat Index.” What is a “cushiony” blush? What color is “Heat Index”? What does “Glow Play” do for me?
Today, AI can solve one of the biggest challenges for retailers: helping consumers find the right products that meet their unique and personalized needs quickly and easily. Our recent research report uncovered that two-thirds (66%) of people believe that retailers use product language and descriptions that make it too challenging for them to find what they want.
AI can help with this by dynamically optimizing product content — both on the front end for shopper-facing content and the back end for AI and search engine consumption — so brands and retailers can ensure their products are accurately described, easily discovered, and precisely relevant to what consumers want. AI empowers retailers to balance merchant-and marketer-driven language with consumer-centric attributes and copy, improving clarity and confidence from the very first search through to purchase.
This new generation of AI levels the playing field. It helps businesses of all sizes increase product visibility, improve search relevance, and personalize marketing at scale. Retailers who embrace AI-optimized product content are better equipped to meet consumers where they are, ensuring the right products appear at the right time — driving discovery, connection, and conversion.
CDU: How does AI-powered product content optimization specifically improve searchability for cosmetics and personal care products? Can you share examples of how beauty brands have successfully leveraged AI to improve product descriptions and drive conversions?
PG: Product content optimization (PCO) is the automated, dynamic process of enriching product data with consumer, merchant, marketer, and machine-friendly product information. With PCO integrated across a retailer’s advertising and e-commerce stack, beauty brands and retailers can boost product discoverability across traditional channels like Google (all surfaces), TikTok, Meta (e.g. Facebook, Instagram), e-commerce sites and marketplaces, as well as generative-AI powered search engines.
Lily AI’s platform analyzes consumer searches and dynamically enriches product data with consumer-centric language that is customized and optimized for the unique specs of a given platform. The product content improvements span attributes, synonyms, trends, phrases, titles, and long and short descriptions in both consumer-facing and backend contexts.
For example, if a lipstick is described as “ginger,” but a consumer is looking for “peach,” the platform, drawing on the largest proprietary library of human-labeled data and industry-specific observations and learnings, will understand that “ginger” could be correlated to “peach,” “soft orange” or “warm beige,” enabling the “ginger lipstick” to show up in results when someone searches for “peach lipstick” or “summer shade lipstick.”
Product content optimization also ensures retailers have enough descriptors and context related to their products that consumers also get the details they need to inspire a purchase decision.
And what’s wonderful about today’s AI solutions is that we can incorporate brand voice into the optimized content so that a brand’s products can still be differentiated from their competitors and remain unique in the mind of the consumer.
Estée Lauder Companies, Sephora, and L’Oréal each continue to impress us with their AI-powered customer-centric strategies. While individual brands are experimenting with interesting initiatives as well, we think these three pioneers are ones to watch for inspiration and results!
CDU: The study found that 80% of consumers have abandoned a search due to ineffective product descriptions. What are the biggest mistakes beauty brands make when it comes to online product descriptions, and how can they correct them to improve the shopping experience?
PG: Consumers know the type of product they want for their personalized beauty regimen and expect beauty retailers to be able to help them meet their needs quickly and relevantly. As a result, retailers and brands must reevaluate how they describe their products online to better align with the words that consumers typically use in a search.
Today, “merchant- and marketer-speak” is applied manually by both eCommerce and marketing teams seeking to inspire and differentiate, yet due to manual processes and a dominant focus on romance copy, we end up seeing:
- Inherent subjectivity can create inconsistencies in output, depending on the person who is manually inputting information
- Human error creates incomplete, inaccurate, unclear, and irrelevant data
- A fundamental lack of automation that creates inefficiencies and process overhead
Unfortunately, industry-driven product content is typically void of both natural consumer language and contextual understanding (“consumer-speak”). It’s also not optimized for AI, whereby agents and algorithms (“machine-speak”) are now making rational decisions and taking independent actions.
Does anyone really search for “Garance” or “Dragon Girl” red lipstick? Do they shop for “Heat Index Cushiony Blush?” Probably only those who are lucky enough to be buying a second time around! Let’s not make those first-time purchasers do so much work to connect with the new products they would love to try and use in their daily routines.
Beauty brands and retailers must meet customers where they are, which is often at the very beginning. By recognizing that the online shopping experience is evolving, especially with regard to where consumers are discovering and searching for products and how they search, beauty brands can truly make their mark.
As the lines between digital commerce and digital marketing blur, those that swiftly adopt technologies to enhance product descriptions and optimize search and discovery experiences wherever they occur will win the customer’s heart, face, and nails.
CDU: With 85% of consumers willing to switch brands if they can’t find what they’re looking for, how can cosmetics and personal care brands ensure they’re not losing customers due to poor product descriptions or ineffective search terms?
PG: Consumers know what they want and want it now. Our report uncovered that more than half of consumers (57%) said they use a retailer’s search bar when shopping online and expressed the importance of the results being relevant and aligned to their search.
However, if shoppers aren’t able to find what they are looking for, they are willing to go elsewhere to find it. And to be clear, when we say they know what they want, they are searching with terms and phrases such as “lightweight everyday blush” or “natural looking blush with a subtle dewy glow, not shiny.”
When they know the brand, certainly they might use the branded terms “soft glam satin foundation” or “vintage single extract essence,” yet more often than not, when looking for something new to meet a particular need in their beauty life, they are using far more colloquial and simple language.
The use of product content optimization (PCO) is critical for the beauty industry to ensure they remain in sync with their customers and not make them do too much work to understand their products with confusing, brand- and industry-specific descriptions. When done correctly, the “lustreglass sheer-shine lipstick ” from Brand A is more likely to come up in a Gen Zer’s search for an “eco-friendly sheer lip color” on TikTok, as well as a Gen Xer’s search for a “light shiny lipstick with natural ingredients” on Google.
By using AI, all the ways that consumers search for products can now be understood and answered with the optimal products, making it easier for people to find exactly what they want, no matter where they shop or search.
CDU: The survey found that 71% of shoppers are willing to spend more when they have a good search experience. What is the potential revenue impact for beauty and personal care brands that invest in AI-driven product content optimization, and what metrics should they track to measure success?
PG: The potential revenue impact for beauty and personal care brands investing in AI-driven product content optimization is significant. With 71% of shoppers willing to spend more after a seamless search experience, beauty brands that optimize their product content for both consumers and AI-powered search engines — Google AI Overviews, Google Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, or others — are better positioned to capture increased customer spend, drive higher conversion rates, and boost overall sales.
AI-optimized content ensures products show up in relevant search results, reducing friction in the path to purchase. It also means that after the consumer finds what they are looking for, the product includes enough details in the form of descriptions, highlights, photos, videos, and reviews to close the sale.
This leads to higher discoverability, stronger consumer engagement, and ultimately, improved loyalty — especially important in highly categories like beauty and personal care.
In particular, when it comes to measuring success, our brand clients track key metrics such as: improvements to Google Quality Scores and Ad Rank, impressions lift, clicks, PDP visits, conversion, and most importantly, sales growth. By focusing on these indicators, brands can directly tie AI content optimization efforts to measurable revenue growth and long-term consumer loyalty.
CDU: As AI continues to shape e-commerce in the beauty industry, what emerging trends should cosmetics and personal care brands be aware of?
PG: One area that I am most excited about is Agentic AI, and I think it is something we all need to pay close attention to – it is here to stay and will only get better, and it will get better in short order, too. I know that some people say Agentic is in the midst of a major hype cycle, and while that may be true in certain regards, I still think it’s important for retailers and brands to quickly research relevant solutions to their existing challenges, adopt early and experiment in order to remain competitive and relevant.
When product data foundations are accurate, relevant, rich, and optimized, Agentic AI solutions can play a valuable role in autonomously and proactively analyzing information and situations, making high-quality decisions, and acting independently. This will allow humans to perform creative and higher-level strategy and decision-making work.
This year, things will move fast, but the creativity, especially in such a human-centric industry, will remain with people while AI will be able to push forward how that creativity gets into the hands of shoppers.
We need to be receptive to doing things very differently and leveraging AI to do what it does best. Importantly, we need to bridge the gap in language between brands and consumers. With AI, it’s a fairly easy yet highly lucrative fix. Happy customers spend money and become brand loyalists – and that is a beautiful result for everyone!