What’s your project about?

My research investigates how user-generated content about beauty dupes on TikTok might influence sales performance of both the original (duped) and the alternative (duping) brands. With dupes becoming a viral phenomenon on social media, understanding their potential impact on brand performance could provide valuable insights for the beauty industry.

What’s the research problem?

While dupes - products that match the look, feel, ingredients, and results of usually more expensive products - have gained massive popularity through TikTok, we don't yet understand how these viral comparisons might affect actual sales of both the original and dupe products. Previous research has mostly focused on consumer evaluations of copycats, but hasn't examined real-world sales impacts or the role of user-generated content in driving dupe popularity.

Which solution does your paper bring to the problem?

Our research aims to combine real-world sales data from a global beauty retailer with TikTok content analysis to measure how viral dupe videos might influence purchasing behavior. We plan to differentiate between brand-led and consumer-led dupes, and examine both immediate and longer-term sales effects on the original and duping brands. We intend to use either a market response model or regression discontinuity design to analyze these relationships, which should help us identify potential causal effects of viral dupe content on sales.

How did you study this?

We're analyzing weekly sales data from 2020-2024 across 48 websites, covering 2,624 brands and 189,684 products. We've collected 15,768 TikTok videos from 6,909 creators using relevant hashtags like #dupe and #beautydupes. Using text and video analysis, we're matching dupe brand/product pairs and comparing their sales performance to control products. We plan to employ either a market response modeling approach or regression discontinuity design to examine how viral dupe videos might impact sales patterns, while controlling for other market factors and seasonal effects.

What did you find?

Our preliminary analysis of brand pairs suggests a possible "halo effect" - when featured in dupe videos, both the original and dupe products appear to experience sales increases compared to non-duped products from the same brands. The viral dupe products seem to show strong sales performance relative to other products from the duping brand. However, these are initial findings and we need to conduct more robust analyses to confirm these patterns.

What can practitioners learn from these results?

While our research is still ongoing, our preliminary findings suggest potential implications for beauty brands' product development and social media strategies. Rather than viewing dupes as purely competitive threats, brands might consider how viral comparisons could potentially boost awareness and sales for both products. This might inform how brands approach influencer partnerships and respond to being either duped or positioned as a dupe. However, we need to complete our analysis before making definitive recommendations.

What are the next steps?

Next steps include refining our econometric approach, incorporating engagement metrics to understand which types of videos have the strongest effects, and extending our analysis to more brand pairs to test if our preliminary findings hold across different cases.