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When Bridget Dolan breezed into the Sephora store on San Francisco’s Powell Street on a recent Thursday afternoon, her iPhone lit up. This happens a lot—anytime she passes within a few feet of a Sephora store, really, which in her role as the beauty emporium’s vice president of digital marketing is often.
最近一个周四下午，当布里吉特o多兰轻盈地走进旧金山鲍威尔街丝芙兰(Sephora)专卖店的时候，她的iPhone手机突然闪烁了一下。这种情况经常发生——真的，任何时候，只要她迈入一家丝芙兰店几英尺，这一幕就会出现。而作为这家美容用品商场的数字营销副总裁，她当然是这里的常客。
A notification on her phone’s screen informed Dolan that she had a Sephora gift card with a bunch of loyalty points—more than 7,000—to spend on goop and glitz. Detecting her proximity to the store, the Sephora app on her iPhone had triggered Passbook, Apple’s coupon and ticket storing app, to remind her. “I like to think of Passbook as a magnet to pull clients into the store,” she said. “Suddenly, I’m like, ‘I have a red-hot gift card at Sephora I forgot about.’”
手机屏幕上出现的一条通知告诉多兰，她获得了一张丝芙兰礼品卡，赠送超过7,000点忠诚积分，可用来购买美容化妆品。监测到多兰靠近这家店面之后，其iPhone手机上的丝芙兰应用程序已经启动Passbook【苹果公司(Apple)开发的优惠券和门票存储应用】来提醒她。“我总是认为Passbook就像是一块磁石，能够拉拢客户进入店面，”她说。“我突然想到，‘我还有一张最新的丝芙兰礼品卡呢，我都忘记了。’”
It’s one of the many ways the makeup company, which is owned by the luxury goods giant LVMH, is using technology to draw in customers and make them spend more time with it, whether in person or online. “We didn’t want to just put technology in here that’s flashy,” she said, gesturing around a store that was humming with the sounds of pop music and filled with cubicle-dwellers trying out new looks on their lunch breaks. “We want to integrate technology into our shopping experience in a way that’s additive and doesn’t go against the grain of the way someone would want to shop.”
这家隶属于奢侈品巨头路威酩轩集团(LVMH)的化妆品公司，正在运用科技手段吸引客户在其门店驻留更长时间（不论是上实体店，还是网络商店），上述应用只是众多方式之一。“我们不想在一个如此光鲜时髦的场所生硬地应用技术手段，”她一边说，一边用手指扫了一下店面四周。在这个播放着流行音乐的店面，处处可见利用午餐休息时间来尝试新形象的写字楼白领。“我们想把技术整合到购物体验之中，这是一种附加营销手段，不会背离客户对购物体验的期望。”
Bypassing a battalion of blush, Dolan sidled up to a kiosk and lightly tapped on its display. This is the Sensa kiosk, she said—one of three interactive screens that help Sephora customers pick out the right product for them, with or without the assistance of a “cast member,” the company’s name for its staffers.
绕过一群正在试妆的红粉佳人，多兰悄悄走进一台设备，轻拍了一下它的显示屏。她说，这是一台采用Sensa技术的机器——三个互动屏幕中有一个能够帮助丝芙兰客户挑选合适的产品，不管有没有一位美容顾问在一旁协助。
Sephora uses Sensa as a tool to select fragrances, the business on which the chain was founded. The kiosk starts with general questions—do you want to smell like flowers or fruit?—and continues refining choices based on your previous answers. Think of it as Amazon’s recommended reading algorithm, but for smelling good. Last year, Sephora installed Sensa in all of their more than 1,700 stores last year, Dolan said. “We love that technology so much that we bought the company,” she said, “and we’ll continue to enhance the experience.”
丝芙兰使用Sensa作为一种挑选香水的工具，而香水则是这家连锁店的立店之本。Sensa会首先询问一些一般性问题，比如，你想散发花香还是水果香？然后基于客户此前的答案，对选择不断细化。你可以把它视为亚马逊网站(Amazon)推荐阅读算法的另一种版本，但更好闻。去年，丝芙兰公司在旗下超过1,700家分店中全部安装了Sensa设备，多兰说：“我们特别喜欢这项技术，以至于买下了这家公司，我们将继续提升顾客体验。”
Dolan strode past the bevy of perfume bottles surrounding Sensa and stopped at another interactive display, this one for skin care products. The device works in a similar way to the fragrance kiosk, but also pulls in reviews of products from users and experts, plus more data mined from Sephora’s website. “It helps to have the best of what’s amazing online—the search and sort filters, what are the best sellers, what’s top rated?” she said. “The whole idea for us is that it’s unbiased. If you picked this product and said, ‘Give me products that work with it,’ the products that work with it aren’t necessarily from that brand.”
她大步穿过一溜摆放在Sensa设备周围的香水瓶，停留在另一个推介护肤品的互动显示屏前。这台设备的运行机理与香水显示屏类似，但它还汇集了一些来自用户和专家的评论，还有更多挖掘自丝芙兰网站的数据。“支持令人赞叹的在线技术，比如搜索和排序过滤器，了解到哪些是最畅销的产品，哪些是最受好评的产品，当然有助于消费者挑选商品，”她说。“我们的整体思路是，推介过程应该是不偏不倚的。如果你挑选了这款产品，说‘给我一些与它配套使用的产品，’那些配套产品不一定来自这个品牌。”
Dolan saved her favorite marriage—of makeup and machinery—for last. She cleared a path to the center of the store, where a third kiosk, smaller than the rest, sat adjacent to a well-lit mirror. This one, which Sephora calls Color IQ, uses a hand-held capture device that calibrates to each client’s visage and maps out their skin color on a range of 1,500 different hues. Every bit the director in the day’s production, Dolan flagged down a cast member to try it out on me. Two swipes over my face and neck—”You have really nice skin,” the young woman said—and Color IQ gave me the designation of 5y05 (“y” as in yellow; there’s also “r” for red) and an array of foundations and concealers that match that code.
多兰把她最喜欢的化妆品机器设备留到最后介绍。她径直走向专卖店中心。在那里，第三台互动设备摆放在一个光线充足的镜子旁边。这台比其他两部设备都小，被丝芙兰公司称为“颜色智商”(Color IQ)的机器，使用一个手持拍摄设备对准每位客户的面部，然后以多达1,500种不同的色调来描绘她们的肤色。作为当天的“导演”，多兰招呼一位美容顾问测试一下我的肤色。这位年轻女士刷了两下我的脸和脖子，“你的皮肤真好，”她说。“颜色智商”随即确定了我的肤色类型——5y05（“y”代表黄色；还有“R”代表红色），以及一组与这个代码相匹配的粉底和遮瑕膏。
The goal of the system is to cut down on a traditionally tedious process. “The average woman buys seven foundations before she finds the right one,” Dolan said. “Not only is she looking for the right color, it might be, ‘Oh I don’t want to spend $65.’ It really is the right product, the right formulation, and the right shade.’”
这套系统的目标是减少传统上非常繁琐的挑选过程。“平均而言，一位女士需要买7种粉底，才能找到合适自己肤色的产品，”多兰说。“她不仅仅是在寻找合适的颜色，或许还有类似‘哦，我可不希望花65美元’这样的心理。这真的是合适的产品，合适的配方，合适的色度。”
And once you’ve found the perfect scent, skin care products, and shades with which to makeup your face, Sephora has yet another tool it wants you to use: Beauty Board, a feature within its smartphone app and on its website that functions like an in-house Instagram. Dolan scrolled through some of the latest posts: one featured gold glitter eyeliner; another, coral-colored cheeks. With Beauty Board, customers and staffers can upload photos of their freshly-done faces and tag products so others can emulate their look. Selfies, it turns out, are very much Sephora’s friend.
一旦你找到完美的香氛、护肤品和面部底妆产品，丝芙兰还有另一种希望你使用的工具：Beauty Board。这是一款在丝芙兰手机应用和官网上都具备的功能，其运作方式就像是照片分享网站Instagram的内部交流版。多兰浏览了一下最新发布的一些帖子：一张是极富特色的金色闪粉眼线，另一张是珊瑚色腮红。通过Beauty Board，消费者和员工可以上传她们刚刚打理过的脸部照片，并附上使用的化妆品名称，这样其他人就可以模仿她们的妆容。事实证明，自拍真是丝芙兰的好朋友。
“Ultimately the idea will be that a cast member will say ‘Hey, do you want me to take a picture of your makeover with your phone?,’” Dolan said, stopping on a photo of a twentysomething woman with turquoise eyeshadow. “Now you can look at that and say, ‘Oh, this is the product I should use to get that look,’ instead of going through all the trial and error.”
“最终的想法是，一位美容顾问会说，‘嘿，你想让我帮你用手机拍一张化妆后的照片吗？’”多兰说。她的目光停留在一位二十出头，打着蓝绿色眼影的女子自拍照上。“现在你可以看着它说，‘哦，这就是我想要的，能达到这种效果的产品，’根本没必要经历繁琐的试错过程。”
With that, Dolan ducked away to spend some of her 7,000 points, consulting her phone to see what makeup staples she needed to refill. She hadn’t put down her phone the half hour we’d spent in the store, which, it turns out, is behavior Sephora expects and even encourages. “You can use your phone, we want you to take it out in our store,” she said. “It’s an opportunity for us, for sure.”
就这样，多兰陆续花掉了一些积分，她不停地通过手机来查看她还需要补充哪些化妆品。在我们一起逛店的半小时内，多兰一刻也没有放下她的手机。事实证明，这正是丝芙兰预期甚至鼓励的行为。她说：“你可以使用你的手机，我们希望你在逛店时掏出手机。毫无疑问，对于我们来说这是一个机会。”
