Dive Brief:

• Ulta Beauty is launching an advertising campaign, spending a "meaningful amount" according to CMO Dave Kimbell, to broaden its consumer base and remind U.S. consumers that its still there, reports Bloomberg.   

• Since is founding in 1990, Ulta and its rival Sephora have coexisted. For the most part, Ulta has been less mall-oriented yet more suburban, while Sephora is a fixture of city centers and malls. 

• Both have drawn customers away from traditional department store beauty counters, with Ulta serving a wider array of budgets. But according to Kimbell, there are still many who haven't heard of Ulta. 

Dive Insight:

Ulta has seen sales surge of late, both in stores and online, despite a fairly low profile.

But its new ad campaign, which should help raise its profile with the many Americans who don’t really know of its existence (or if they do, haven’t wandered in yet) is about more than taking on Sephora.

The beauty sector is healthy in general, as department stores fight back to improve their beauty counters and win back customers who’ve shifted to Sephora and Ulta. And drugstores are increasingly changing up their beauty aisles and offerings and successfully capturing more beauty dollars. Target, which offers upscale brands in addition to traditional drugstore ones, is working on revamping its beauty aisles to include dedicated staff to give advice.

Then there are upstarts Birchbox and Ipsy, which are shaking up the sector with e-commerce innovations like subscriptions.

An ad campaign should go far in letting Americans know about Ulta.

“The reality is national marketing can be very powerful,” Simeon Siegel, an analyst at Nomura Securities, told Bloomberg. “The best thing a company can have is an undertapped audience and a strong product.”

But if it’s to keep up its current surge, it may also need some other innovations, like Birchbox and Ipsy’s subscriptions (recently copied by Sephora) or Sephora’s membership-based shipping deals.