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Men's Hair Styling Products: Sales Channels
While the requested information is not readily available in the public domain, there is a survey indicating that the five stores men in the United States shop at most often for personal care products are Walmart, CVS, Target, Walgreens, and Amazon. Given that personal care products include hair styling products, it is likely that these stores are also the most common channels for the sales or purchase of men's hair styling products in the country. Mordor Intelligence has released a segmentation of the hair styling products market by channel, but the market is specific to Europe and is inclusive of both male and female consumers.
METHODOLOGY
In answering this request, the first thing we did was search for the channel segmentation of the hair styling products market among publicly available images and charts. We started with the statistical portal Statista, as it often helps us identify if requested statistics have been previously covered or studied in the public domain. Searching within Statista, we only found two recent channel distributions, the first one being the distribution of the United States cosmetics and personal care market in 2019 and the second one being the distribution of beauty and personal care sales in the United States in 2016. We were unfortunately unable to find any distribution specific to the United States hair styling products market for men. When we looked among published images outside Statista, we came across Mordor Intelligence's distribution of the European hair styling products market in 2017 by channel. Even though the actual pie chart values are not displayed, we were able to estimate the values using a protractor extension. The market in Mordor Intelligence's report is unfortunately inclusive of both men and women.
Since our initial approach did not yield the desired results, we proceeded to look for industry reports. Market research firms do not appear to have published any report specific to the United States hair styling products market for men, as all we were able to find, apart from Mordor Intelligence's report on the European hair styling products market, were Mordor Intelligence, Technavio, and Future Market Insights's reports on the global hair styling products market. These reports contain channel segmentation data, but the figures are behind paywalls.
Given that the distribution of the European hair styling products market by channel is publicly available, we searched for surveys to check if men shop differently from women when it comes to hair styling products and if there are any differences in behavior between European men and American men. What we found was that Prosper Insights & Analytics has recently polled American men about where they shop most often for skincare and cosmetic products (including hair styling products). GlobalData has also recently surveyed American men about where they feel uncomfortable buying grooming or personal care products. While the survey results do not provide the distribution of sales by channel, they offer valuable insights into the shopping preferences of American men when it comes to personal care products. PwC, as well, has recently conducted a global poll to learn about consumers' shopping habits and whether these habits vary from one region to another.
MARKET SEGMENTATION BY CHANNEL
While the segmentation of the United States hair styling products market for men is not available in the public domain, there is information on how the European hair styling products market in 2017 was segmented. According to Mordor Intelligence, the whole European hair styling products market that year was distributed by sales channel as follows:
Information on how the United States beauty and personal care market in 2016 was distributed by channel is publicly available as well. According to Statista, the distribution of beauty and personal care product sales that year was as follows:
Mordor Intelligence's breakdown of the European hair styling products market by channel is the closest information we could find. Considering that, in its latest release of the Global Consumer Insights Survey, PwC did not report any significant differences in shopping preferences between American consumers and Western European consumers and highlighted only differences between Chinese and American consumers, we could assume that the distribution of the United States hair styling products market by channel is more or less the same as the distribution of the European hair styling products market by channel.
There appears to be differences between the market for men and the market for women, however. As can be seen below, surveys suggest there are differences between men and women in the United States when it comes to shopping for personal care or grooming products.
MEN'S CHANNEL PREFERENCES
Prosper Insights & Analytics recently polled 3,357 men in the United States about where they shop most often for skincare and cosmetic products (including hair styling products), and the answers of these men resulted in the following distribution: Walmart (27.3%), no preference (21.8%), other (13.1%), CVS (8.0%), Target (7.0%), Walgreens (4.3%), Amazon (3.7%), Costco (2.0%), Kroger (1.7%), Rite Aid (1.5%), Meijer (1.1%), Macy's (1.0%), Dollar General (0.9%), Dollar Tree (0.8%), Sephora (0.7%), HEB (0.7%), Sam's Club (0.5%), Publix (0.4%), Bath & Body Works (0.4%), BJ's (0.4%), Shoprite (0.4%), Ulta (0.4%), Family Dollar (0.3%), Fry's (0.3%), eBay (0.2%), Avon (0.2%), Mary Kay (0.1%), and other online/Internet retailer (0.1%).
These results are, to some extent, consistent with the finding of GlobalData that most men in the United States would feel uncomfortable visiting beauty retailers to purchase grooming or personal care products (including hair styling products). When asked about the stores they would feel uncomfortable visiting to buy personal care products, 53.4% of men in the country answered 'beauty retailers,' 17.4% answered 'drugstores', 12.6% answered 'department stores', 10.8% answered 'barbers', 9.2% answered 'mass merchants', and 4.3% answered 'online stores'. When it comes to online purchases, however, GlobalData appears to have a different finding. Based on its survey, 62.5% of men in the country regularly shop online for personal care products, while only 39.3% of women in the country do so.
As more precise information is unavailable, we assume that these men's shopping preferences do not vary significantly across personal care product categories. That is, American men's channel preferences when it comes to shopping for personal care products are indicative of American men's channel preferences when it comes to shopping for hair styling products.