When a market is as cluttered and saturated as the lipstick market, you need to rethink just about every aspect of your strategy. For Maybelline we realized that in this environment Word-of-Mouth was a far more influential a medium than advertising. And who better to influence young Malaysian women than the bloggers they look up to for advice. We moved away from traditional media and threw a make-up party with Malaysia’s most influential women bloggers and inspired them with our products to influence their followers. They did the rest.
What was our strategic communications challenge?
Define success in your category. What was going on? Provide the information on the category, the marketplace, the company, the competitive environment, the target audience and/or the product/service that created your challenge and your response to it.
Harnessing the power of girl talk
The lipstick category is so fragmented that success comes only to the brand with the ability to engage and interact with consumers. That is why fresh, innovative ideas that break away from clutter have always been the utmost priority for a brand like Maybelline.
Especially when your consumers are made up of young women with low brand affinity, we needed a touch point that is credible, engaging and last but not least uncluttered. What better medium could tackle the Gen-Y and yet fulfil all criterias than a digital platform – the Internet.
Our core audience – 15-34-year-olds – constituted the chunk of heavy Internet users; students aged 15-24 who averaged nearly 1-3 hours (Source: Engaging APAC consumers in digital world, Universal McCann Consumer Insight) on the Internet daily. The interesting discovery that ultimately led to our direction was that nearly 44% (Source: Engaging APAC consumers in digital world, Universal McCann Consumer Insight) of 15-24-year-olds were most progressive when it came to blogging and blogging-related activities. It seemed that our audience was immensely swayed and influenced by the lives and views of other people through their blogs.
More importantly, young women declared that they paid a lot of attention to reviews of brands in blogs before trying them out. This meant that a new medium could be harnessed to influence our audience. Blog marketing became the primary platform for an entirely new Maybelline experience.
What were our campaign objectives?
Your entry may have one or all of the following objectives: A. Quantifiable, B. Behavioral, C. Perceptual/ Attitudinal. Give specific goals for all of these if all apply to your campaign. Provide a % or # for all goals. If you do not have quantifiable goals, state this in the Entry Form and explain why. Provide benchmark and context for your goals versus year prior and in context of competitive landscape. Explain: What was the behavioral or perceptual/ attitudinal response you were looking for in the context of your competition and category? Examples: to meet a concrete share or sales target; to obtain a specific behavioral response, to modify existing brand perceptions, to establish new product awareness.
Even during its introduction into the market, the Maybelline Watershine 3D Collagen sales numbers weren’t at all positive. We needed to find a new way to inject energy into our brand. The campaign was set to be measured quantitatively and qualitatively:
From ugly Betty to shining diva
Quantitative
- Blog traffic
- Organic search results
- High word-of-mouth
- Re-establish brand awareness
“Our Shining Moments”
How did we arrive at the big idea?
We needed to impact an uncontested playing field to drive maximum impact for Maybelline.
Maybelline Watershine 3D collagen needed to be experienced first-hand within a group/ community where social bonds are formed based on memorable shared experiences, (Source: Engaging APAC consumers in digital world, Universal McCann Consumer Insight) a ‘sisterhood’ moment that allows both the group as well as the individual to shine and impress.
This would ultimately lead to a stronger, more influential voice for Maybelline to their customers.
How did we bring the idea to life?
The big idea was to invite the most influential women bloggers to create memorable experiences around Maybelline to encourage positive brand reviews, thereby influencing our audience towards purchase.
The idea kicked off with an exciting “Make-Up Party”. The party, though small, was cozy and united 6 bloggers (none whom had never met previously) to indulge themselves and to tangibly experience the product.
2 Fashion & Beauty bloggers were engaged for a 4-week long blog marketing campaign. A limited budget meant zero media placement so extra pizzazz and ingenuity was needed to generate hype and get that extra buzz going.
We engaged 4 more high-profile female bloggers with high site-traffic to also attend the Make-Up Party. We requested these 4 bloggers to focus more on the experience of using Maybelline rather than just the product and its benefits, as opposed to the brief given to the 2 Fashion & Beauty bloggers. This helped us cover both the product, as well as the critical experience, with this rather personal category.
It was no surprise that the whole experience of experimenting with the different looks they could achieve with Maybelline’s make-up brought a smile to every blogger’s face. They identified the colours that suited them, put on make-up for each other and discovered new looks they never though they could achieve. The best part was that this lipstick worked to enhance every look they attempted.
How do we know it worked?
Blog Traffic & Word-of-mouth
The campaign resulted in 6 product reviews within the first week of the campaign, all with details of the product and the bloggers’ unforgettable experience at the Maybelline Make-Up Party. The result was an overwhelming demand from other women bloggers for Maybelline to host another Maybelline Make-Up Party.
Site-traffic for the www.mywomenstuff.com (one of the niche Fashion & Beauty bloggers) increased 12% after the first Maybelline post was published. Traffic soared a further 13% after the other 2 supporting blogs published their posts.(Source: Blogger Site Traffic Report, Nuffnang 21 July – 24 Aug’08)
Organic Search Results
Within 2 weeks into the campaign, our key search words ¬– Maybelline and Watershine 3D Collagen displayed the engaged blog sites with Maybelline posts coming up in the top 10 list in organic searches on Google Malaysia and Yahoo! search engines.
Brand Awareness
While product sales were not part of the campaign’s KPI, the online blog campaign successfully managed to arrest sales from dipping further since its launch in July (Jul-Aug: 0.23%). (Source: L’Oreal Malaysia)
International Role Model
Due to the overwhelming response we received via this campaign, Maybelline New York and Paris have been using our campaign as a model for case studies in other markets to showcase the success of utilising out of the box ideas to launch a product and generate the necessary buzz and word-of-mouth it needs to take off.
Anything else going on that might have helped drive results?
There was no additional communication support for the online campaign at this period. Point-of-sales materials were incorporated into retails stores in November while TVC was re-aired in December 2008, contributing to a sales increase of 0.44%. (Source: L’Oreal Malaysia)
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