Proof by Part and Sum: Who’s winning the beauty game?

ICYMI - We just published our latest methodology: Share of Culture. Here’s a quick review.

Share of Culture (SoC) is Part and Sum's proprietary measurement framework for CMOs, VPs, and other marketing leaders to read their brand equity amongst their competitors. Instead of counting likes and calling it a strategy, SoC scores your brand's cultural equity — the volume, engagement, resonance, sentiment, and creator amplification behind everything people say about you — against those same measures for your competitive set.

Equity alone tells you if you're growing. Context tells you if you're winning. Share of Culture gives you both.

Here’s a brief example from the beauty world. Earlier this year, we ran Share of Culture on e.l.f. Beauty and five direct competitors in the space — NYX, ColourPop, wet n wild beauty, Makeup Revolution, and Milani. The result: e.l.f. holds a 30% Share of Culture, the single largest in the set, on the strength of 122K mentions in the measured window — more than double its next-closest competitor.

Breaking that number down by component shows why e.l.f. leads, not just that it does. It wins outright on Conversation Share (38.5% vs. NYX's 28.0%) and Engagement Share (38.0% vs. NYX's 29.0%) — the two heaviest-weighted measures in the model — and edges into a clear #1 on Creator Share as well, at 42.7%. Worth noting: the picture isn't uniformly dominant. On Resonance Share, e.l.f. leads by a slimmer margin (18.4%, with Wet n Wild and Milani close behind), and on Sentiment Share it actually sits last in the set, in a tight cluster between 16.2% and 17.6%. That texture allows us to know where to flex and where to refine, and where the brand can stay steady and resilient in a changing cultural landscape.

After this, our strategists looked deeper into the "why" behind the brand’s large presence, leading us to see that the brand indexed higher in Conversation, Creator Amplification and Engagement, but left opportunity when it came to Resonance and Sentiment.

Here’s what we found: most of the category competes for the same pop-culture tie-ins, but e.l.f. picked a lane nobody else was in — women's football — and kept showing up there. This year, they were the presenting sponsor of the 2026 NWSL Challenge Cup, and they appeared as the back-of-shirt sponsor for Tottenham Hotspurs football club.

e.l.f. also turns single moments into annual traditions, then widens its footprint through smart portfolio moves: making themsevles visible for four straight years during the Super Bowl, and making headlines by becoming H&M’s first-ever outside beauty partner.

The twelve-month chart of SoC over time makes the connection between activity and equity visible: e.l.f.'s share dips through the fall, then climbs every time one of these moments lands — a jump around the Super Bowl in February, another sharper climb into July following the NWSL Challenge Cup, while competitors move in a much narrower band underneath.

There’s a lot of noise when assessing the power of a brand. Being able to surface that tension is what allowed our teams to advise on where the brand's cultural position is durable and where they can optimize, turning the measurement into a roadmap for growth.

Share of Culture is a repeatable methodology. Part and Sum can run the same diagnostic on any category — showing where a brand leads, where competitors hold territory it hasn't claimed, and what a twelve-month plan to close that gap looks like.

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