How to use ICE in the brow business?

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1. Background

This article is based on interviews conducted during various research projects with 82 experienced PMU artists, most of whom specialize in powder brows, hairstrokes, and microblading. Most interviews were conducted between 2020 and 2023, with many ongoing related research projects. Of these artists, 65 were in EU countries, 11 in the UK, and 6 in the US. Data from various digital media marketing campaigns conducted by the powderbrows.io team was used to analyze the artist's observations. Additionally, three different search engine optimizing and digital marketing experts have reviewed the article and contributed based on their expertise and experience.

The problem the article aims to solve

Effective decision-making in the competitive field of brow artistry is not solely about intuition and creativity. Promising ideas may not yield the desired results due to insufficient evaluation. The ICE model is an indispensable tool that helps artists assess the real input needed to make something work, enabling them to compare alternative options rationally. It’s about striking the right balance between innovation and strategic thinking. This article introduces the ICE model specifically in the brow business and aims to help both starting artists and more seasoned brow artists implement that.

Why do you need a model for making decisions anyway?

When embarking on a career in the microblading or Powder Brows industry, newcomers must recognize that they are entering a competitive field where resources are often scarce. The initial phase of growing a brow business is fraught with challenges, often involving limited time, energy, and financial resources. Success demands a robust work ethic, routine, extreme hustle, and strategic planning to lift the business off the ground.

Many artists struggle with prioritizing different aspects of their business, particularly when allocating scarce resources effectively. This leads us to the need for a structured approach to decision-making. One method that has proven successful for many is the ICE model, which we'll delve into in this article.

2. ICE model explained

What is the ICE model?

The ICE model is a decision-making framework that helps artists evaluate and prioritize various business activities. It stands for Impact, Confidence, and Effort, three essential criteria that guide the process. Let's break down each component.

Impact - Assessing the Effect on Business Metrics

Impact refers to a particular action or decision's potential effect on your business metrics, such as customer acquisition, revenue growth, or brand awareness.

As a brow artist, you might evaluate the impact of offering a promotional discount on Powder Brows service for a month. Will it attract new clients? Will it boost sales? Understanding the impact helps you invest in activities that align with your business goals and provide the highest return on investment.

Confidence: Evaluating the Likelihood of Success

Confidence measures how certain you are that a particular tactic will work. It's about assessing the reliability of your data or intuition.

If you're considering a new advertising strategy, how confident are you that it will reach your target audience? Have similar strategies worked for others in your industry? Confidence helps you avoid pursuing ideas based on mere hunches or untested theories, thus minimizing risk.

Effort - Analyzing the Required Resources

Effort considers how easy or challenging a particular task or activity will be. It includes assessing the time, money, and energy required.

Implementing a new booking system might streamline your process but require substantial time and financial investment. Is the payoff worth the effort? Understanding the effort helps you balance ambitious goals with practical constraints, ensuring your plans are achievable and meaningful.

Why You Should Consider Using ICE Model in Brow Business?

The ICE model isn't just a theoretical concept; it's a practical tool tailored for small businesses like the brow industry. Here's why it's beneficial.

You become more objective. It brings objectivity to decision-making by forcing you to evaluate potential actions systematically. You make fewer emotional decisions and, most importantly, waste less time and energy.
You optimize how you use your resources. It helps you allocate your limited resources most effectively, ensuring that you focus on what's most likely to yield results.
You learn to see the bigger, strategic picture. By prioritizing activities based on impact, confidence, and effort, you ensure that your actions align with your broader business strategy.
Adaptability - You have one effective tool to evaluate different decisions
The ICE model is versatile, allowing you to apply it to various aspects of your business, from marketing decisions to client engagement strategies.

In a field as competitive as powder brows, hairstrokes, or microblading having a robust decision-making tool like the ICE model can greatly help you. It empowers you to make informed, strategic choices that align with your unique business needs and constraints.

How to use the ICE model in Practice?

As we have mentioned, the ICE model is not a theoretical framework; it's a practical tool that helps prioritize business activities by systematically evaluating them. Let's use this model in microblading, powder brows, or hairstrokes step-by-step.

Step 1 First list all the potential ideas or activities you want to evaluate. Step 2 Rate each part (Impact, Confidence, Effort) on a 5-point scale.

Impact & Confidence: Use 1 for low and 5 for high.

Example:

1 = Sounds like a pretty good idea 3 = It worked for another artist with a comparable target group 5 = You have tested this and had positive results

Effort: Reverse the scale; 1 for high effort and 5 for low effort.

Step 3 Multiply all three factors to give an ICE score between 1 to 125. A higher score indicates high-impact and low-effort projects.

Avoid getting caught in too much detail; it should not take more than 5 minutes per project.

The Benefits of the 5-Point Scale

When you start using this model, we suggest using a 5-point scale (not 10 points). This is also how we do it in Powderbrows.com Research Center.

Why? Less Confusion. Having less than five different values prevents similar ICE scores and avoids confusion.

It is time-efficient. More than a 5-point scale makes evaluation time-consuming, and setting a score between 1 and 5 is easier than between 1 and 10.

What is Probably the Biggest Benefit of ICE?

The ICE model is a valuable tool for brow artists, especially those often guided by creativity and emotion rather than analytical thinking. This method helps bridge the gap between these divergent tendencies, enabling artists to make more fact-based decisions. By applying the ICE model, artists can objectively assess various business-related choices. It helps curb impulse purchases or investments that may seem appealing but do not genuinely contribute to business growth. In essence, the ICE model provides a structured approach that complements the artistic mindset, fostering better decision-making in the business realm.

In practical terms, many artists have said that this model has helped them to put aside the emotional aspect when making decisions about whether to get a new logo, do a sales campaign, invest in rebranding, run promotional "branding" ads, develop a website or online training solution, concentrate on content, or buy random objects for themselves or to their salon that "kind of but not really" help their business growth and that are just impulse purchases to make them feel significant for a moment.

When to Take ICE with a Grain of Salt?

While highly useful for many brow artists, the ICE model often focuses on short-to-mid-term objectives. This approach prioritizes immediate sales generation over long-term branding efforts, particularly for artists starting in powder brows, hairstrokes, or microblading.

3. Longer term thinking

From a business perspective, this strategy usually makes sense. Many artists must recoup their initial investments and achieve monthly profitability before considering more extensive brand building. There's a saying among seasoned marketers: "A 'branding' campaign is nothing else but a fancy code word for a failed sales campaign." In many cases, there's truth to this statement.

However, the picture changes once an artist becomes profitable. It may be wise to start investing in branding efforts at that point. This could involve splitting the marketing budget, with half devoted to ongoing sales initiatives and the other half to long-term brand development. Branding can concern the artist's personal and brow brands, which may overlap. Still, the key takeaway is to approach branding strategically and to initiate such campaigns only after achieving consistent profitability.

The ICE model, while effective, might not fully capture the nuances of this longer-term perspective, so it's essential to recognize its limitations in this regard, or rather the limitations caused by the users themselves when they practice the system and then tend to keep on focusing on short and mid-terms results when they already should start incorporating a long-time view to it.

A Strong Case for Branding

Many reputable businesses in the brow and pigmentation industry have effectively utilized the ICE model, whether applied systematically or not. Often, these businesses implement the ICE model without fully recognizing it, leading to a somewhat less systematic and incomplete approach. However, this typically results in a natural progression towards brand development, particularly once the business becomes cash-positive.

Our observation of various international brow-related projects and brands indicates that branding has become increasingly crucial in this industry. While this assertion might seem like another marketing cliché, it's supported by a substantial and logical rationale. The primary driving force behind the growing significance of branding is the need for differentiation. Let's delve deeper into this to understand its importance better.

4. Differentiation problem

The main reason for the Inability to Differentiate

As of 2024, the international brow business has reached a point where differentiation has become increasingly challenging, especially with previously effective criteria. A prime example is the quality of work. For years, excelling in techniques like powder brows, microblading, hairstrokes, or lip blush created a distinct competitive edge. The work of highly skilled artists was recognizable and stood out.

However, this scenario has changed by the latter half of 2023 and more so in 2024. Simply having superior quality work no longer guarantees standout recognition. This change is largely due to the widespread availability and affordability of professional retouching services. With costs ranging from approximately 5-15 USD per photo, these services are accessible to almost all artists. When performed by a true professional, the image can rival an international magazine's. The difference between a non-retouched “after” photo of a brow procedure and one professionally edited can be more dramatic than the transformation achieved by the procedure itself.

Professional retouching services can significantly enhance images by utilizing the latest photo editing software and constantly exploring new filter combinations and editing techniques. Many artists acknowledge that their students’ work, even beginners, appears considerably better in retouched form than their own mildly retouched work.

While some may argue that such retouching is deceptive, this does not alter the current scenario. Our extensive research has found no empirical evidence suggesting that unretouched photos perform better on social media simply because they are “natural”. Despite efforts by some artists to gain popularity by highlighting their unretouched photos, data analysis suggests that professionally retouched photos typically perform better.

This shift underlines the increasing necessity of branding. Establishing a strong brand is one of the few ways to differentiate in the current market. This is where the ICE model becomes crucial, guiding brow artists and companies towards effective brand development and market distinction.

5. Conclusions

Many artists rely on gut feeling and superficial analyses for strategic decisions in the brow business. This article presents a more robust approach: decision-making based on the "ICE" model. ICE stands for evaluating each choice in specific situations based on Impact, Confidence, and Effort.

Impact: Assessing the Effect on Business Metrics

Impact involves evaluating the potential effect of a decision on business metrics like customer acquisition, revenue growth, or brand awareness. For example, as a brow artist, consider the impact of offering a promotional discount on Powder Brows for a month. Will it attract new clients or boost sales? Understanding the impact aids in focusing on activities that align with your business goals and yield the best return on investment.

Confidence: Evaluating the Likelihood of Success

Confidence measures your certainty about the effectiveness of a tactic. It's about evaluating the reliability of your data or intuition. When contemplating a new advertising strategy, assess your confidence in its ability to reach your target audience and whether similar strategies have succeeded for others. Confidence helps avoid pursuing ideas based on mere speculation, reducing risk.

Effort: Analyzing the Required Resources

Effort evaluates the difficulty of a task, including the time, money, and energy needed. For instance, implementing a new booking system might streamline processes but require significant investment. Assessing the effort helps balance ambitious goals with realistic capabilities, ensuring achievable and impactful plans.

Using the ICE Model in Brow Business

List all potential ideas or activities for evaluation.
Rate each aspect (Impact, Confidence, Effort) on a 5-point scale. For Impact & Confidence: 1 is low, and 5 is high. For Effort: Reverse the scale, with 1 for high effort and 5 for low effort.
Multiply all three factors for an ICE score between 1 to 125. Higher scores indicate high-impact, low-effort projects.

Avoid overcomplicating; aim for no more than 5 minutes per project

Applying ICE often leads to prioritizing branding over short-term gains, a sound strategy for any profitable brow business in 2024. The rationale is that differentiation has become exceedingly difficult as the quality of work is no longer a standout factor due to the availability of professional retouching. Branding and name recognition have become the primary means of standing out, which aligns with the direction the ICE model often points to.