“Hoping to learn how to strike the perfect balance between brand content and influencer content, we launched the first quadripartite regional test. The marriage of native influencer and brand content was the perfect mix to increase brand awareness and drive purchase intention. The positive findings of this test have clearly redefined our content & media strategy moving forward.” – Myriam Bunni, Senior Brand Manager Ultra Doux at L’Oreal Group
All throughout last July, “natural” personal care brand Garnier, part of L’Oreal Group, pioneered a one-of-a-kind cross-functional collaboration with Facebook, its media agency UM, and @Eswaratti, a KSA-based leading influencer in fashion, beauty, and lifestyle, to develop Garnier’s first branded content ads campaign in the region around its Ultra Doux haircare products line.
This Facebook product, specifically designed to fit the Consumer Product Good vertical and the Beauty sector in particular, was successfully leveraged in Garnier’s media strategy, alongside its global assets, to elevate brand equity.
Here’s what Myriam Bunni, Senior Brand Manager Ultra Doux at L’Oreal Group, told us about the campaign.
What were the main goals for the digital campaign that ran on Facebook platforms?
We set up this campaign with the main goal of creating winning educational yet engaging content, in order to elevate Ultra Doux’s brand equity and drive its naturality megabrand.
With hair treatments being a main focus for the brand, we needed to create a unique way of communicating the USPs of our key SKU, the leave-in cream. Leveraging our relationship with our garnier influencer Mimi (aka @Eswaratti) and the Facebook Creative Shop, we created an authentic communication platform to educate consumers on the product. The marriage of native influencer and brand content was the perfect mix to increase brand awareness and drive purchase intention.
Why did you choose Facebook’s marketing solutions, out of many alternatives?
Facebook’s knowledge of the latest consumer trends, along with its comprehensive measurement solutions, were key assets in building the platform for a co-creation campaign study. The innate presence of influencer content on the platform was fundamental to the accuracy and relevancy of the findings. Our longstanding partnership with Facebook as a group cleared the way for a successful partnership with SMART goals, benchmarks, and next steps.
Which Facebook/Instagram solutions/products did you use for this campaign?
For this campaign, we utilized the Facebook Creative Shop, where we held several sessions to brainstorm on the campaign direction. We had the chance to, from the start, co-create the concept with Mimi who brought to the table her authentic ideas and knowledge of her beauty-savvy following.
Facebook’s Creative Shop helped us build the concept’s framework to clearly convey the brand messaging in the most authentic way.
Accurate measurement of the findings was made possible with the Brand Lift Study that we conducted to evaluate the impact of the campaign on brand awareness, ad recall, message association, and intent.
What were the results of the campaign and did you achieve your goals?
The campaign results confirmed our hypothesis that the combination of brand assets and influencer content would outperform other test cells. These results are key to shaping our YTG 2020 & 2021 strategy and establishing continuous measurement to monitor improvement on the basis of awareness and purchase intent.
The uplifts from the BLS were in line with the sell-out uplifts of the advertised SKU – which grew by +55% in volume in the month of the campaign vs previous months. The latter resulted in record market shares in KSA and bumped up the leave-in cream to #1 SKU in our e-commerce portfolio.
Which measurement methods did you use to gain new learnings?
The BLS results showed a positive lift across the three cells. However, the most effective and impactful strategy was to combine global assets with influencer content, which generated the highest lift across most branding metrics.
This winning combination generated the highest lift of +7.6pts with the lowest CPIC and a high lift of +2.4pts in brand awareness. Ultra Doux ranked first in message association to “natural hair care,” mirroring its #1 positioning in the market (source: AC Nielsen, GCC Value – YTD August 2020).
However, considering how the results were close to those of other brands, there is an opportunity to further enhance the message of naturality and measure the improvement moving forward.
