Beauty Dupe Products: Perceptual Positioning and Choice Determinants

Purpose: This study investigated how consumers perceive beauty dupe products and the attributes they prioritized in their purchase decision. Methods: Two online surveys were conducted with Korean female consumers in their 20s and 30s who had previously searched for or purchased beauty dupe products. In the first survey, 52 respondents evaluated the pairwise similarities among 10 lipstick options, and non-metric multidimensional scaling (MDS) was conducted using the smacof package in R. In the second survey, 103 respondents completed 12 choice tasks involving combinations of four two-level attributes. A conditional logit model with respondent-clustered standard errors was then estimated using the survival package in R. Results: MDS revealed three distinct clusters, indicating that beauty dupes occupy a perceptual position separate from both high-end and affordable beauty products. In the choice-based conjoint analysis, country of manufacture emerged as the most important attribute, with a relative importance of 70.9%, followed by price (13.7%), brand awareness (10.8%), and visual similarity to the high-end product (4.5%). Domestic manufacture, the higher price level, and greater brand awareness were associated with positive utility, whereas visual similarity to high-end products did not have a significant effect on purchase decision. Conclusion: Although visual similarity to high-end products constitutes a basic condition for the product to be perceived as a dupe, consumers’ heavy reliance on product information cues associated with quality and credibility highlights their potential significance in consumers’ evaluations and decision to purchase beauty dupes.