By Travis Stratford
At CASE, our team has a unique perspective when it comes to successful beauty brands as we work across large and small brands, from mass to prestige. We collaborate with global mega brands, recharge legacy brands, refresh digital flagship experiences, and craft social-first activation campaigns. We also help create industry-disruptors like OUAI, Summer Fridays and e.l.f. Cosmetics who have redefined their categories. In this post, we delve into what senior leaders of global brands can learn from the next generation of disruptors in the beauty industry.
Know Your Customer
At CASE, when we ask global brands to tell us about their target, we typically receive 100+ slide PowerPoint decks that meticulously dive into consumer segmentation with exquisite detail. Don’t get me wrong, this info is super helpful and contains rich insight. However, when working with our indie clients, we often find that they possess a more intuitive and more concise understanding of their consumers. Frankly speaking, this simpler approach tends to be more actionable for teams like ours and the brand’s internal teams.
One of our favorite examples is from Jen Atkin at OUAI. For those not familiar with the brand, Jen is an editorial hair stylist who approached our team in 2014 to create a social-first hair-care brand. Since launching, OUAI has become one of the most disruptive brands in North America.
One of Jen’s superpowers is that she intuitively understands her consumer.
At our first meeting with Jen, we asked her who she wanted to target, and without skipping a beat, she told us her new brand was…
“For the girl who buys Zara but wishes it were Celine.”
In other words, her target mindset was women who had an elevated taste level and wanted a little luxury in their lives, but may not have the budget to match. That simple insight hit the mark.
How did Jen intuitively know this about her consumer? Before and after starting the brand, Jen interacted daily with her target audience on social media. She didn’t just read their comments, she interacted with them for hours each day. She also knew the brands they loved, which influencers influenced them, and what cultural trends were most relevant to them.
This relentless focus on the consumer has been a big part of the winning formula for OUAI. Not long after launching, the brand became the most followed prestige hair care brand in North America. The brand then quickly expanded into body and then fragrance, and continues to grow with retailers like Sephora and Ulta. OUAI was acquired by Procter & Gamble in 2021.
In the spirit of global beauty brands connecting with consumers like Jen, we recommend global teams have all levels of their teams engage in what we call “front line” social-listening, which often creates a deeper level of empathy and understanding versus standard social-listening reports. What does “front-line” social listening mean? To us, it means reading and responding to comments each week on the brand’s social channels (and others) and documenting and sharing relevant insights and trends directly with your team.
LEAN INTO SOCIAL-FIRST CONTENT
In 2016, we received a visit from Lauren Ireland and Marianna Hewit, two accomplished beauty bloggers based in Los Angeles. They approached us with an exciting vision to launch a DTC skincare brand. Being well-versed in the beauty industry, they possessed a first-hand, deep understanding of the competitive landscape. Their observations led them to recognize an untapped opportunity for a fresh, Instagram-friendly, clean beauty brand.
Embracing a brand positioning that revolved around the concept of "giving your skin some time off," our team proudly helped develop and launch the brand as Summer Fridays.
From its inception, Lauren and Marianna had the foresight and taste level to design their brand to appeal to their audience on social media. Driven by their brand vision, the Summer Friday’s social-first creative feels premium, authentic, and “real,” which has been one of the key brand differentiators from its more traditional competitors. This has also helped the brand build an authentic community.
Focusing on social-first content has played a significant role in Summer Friday's success. In addition to the connection with their consumers, it helped lead to a successful collaboration with Sephora, enabling the brand to grow from one product to over 20 with strong momentum and sales growth.
With the goal of creating deeper community and connections with consumers like Summer Fridays, we recommend that global teams design their brands for social by concepting and testing on social first, and then, once it’s clear the brand connects emotionally with the consumer, extend that brand concept to more traditional touchpoints and retail experiences.
Be Agile & Fearless
Most global teams have heard of e.l.f. Cosmetics. They’re one of the original digital-first mass-market brands in North America. e.l.f. Cosmetics is a bit different from the first two examples as they came to CASE as an established “mid-sized” brand (not a start-up). Recognizing they needed to recharge their brand and differentiate in an increasingly competitive category, CEO Tarang Amin and CMO Kory Marchisotto also knew they needed to act less like a mid-sized brand and more like a start-up disruptor.
CASE began our engagement with e.l.f. by tightening the brand’s positioning to better capitalize on what the consumer viewed as e.l.f.’s brand “superpowers.” After giving the brand a creative and digital makeover, our main focus was launching a social-first campaign to introduce the revitalized brand to consumers.
e.l.f. Cosmetics has an amazing unwavering commitment to utilizing real-time measurements for decision-making. Instead of the usual approach of creating one comprehensive campaign concept, we swiftly generated more than two dozen fully-realized campaign executions. Each of these executions strategically aligned with one of our identified e.l.f. brand “superpowers.”
In close partnership with performance marketing firm Tinuiti, we deployed the campaign executions through paid social channels. Through continuous real-time measurement, our collaborative team fine-tuned and optimized the high-performing executions while phasing out less successful ones. The team then allocated the full media budget to amplify their reach and impact.
The results were astounding (even to us). One of the executions — which was based on the insight that consumers love e.l.f. because it’s 100% vegan and cruelty free — quickly became one of YouTube’s top performing pre-rolls. For that execution, we collaborated with an LA-based TikTok dog groomer Jess Rona. This e.l.f.ing amazing campaign spot was simple to produce and also overperformed in attracting new users to e.l.f. Cosmetics.
Following this initial campaign, the team continued to “test and learn” by experimenting with new, less-used platforms where e.l.f. consumers spent time. At that point, TikTok was just an emerging platform that was quickly gaining traction. e.l.f. made a modest investment commissioning a TikTok “challenge song” from Movers & Shakers and then seeded it with a small handful of paid TikTok creators. This resulted in a viral explosion generating more than 10 billion views globally and just under 7 million user-generated videos. It’s become one of the most successful TikTok campaigns of all time.
Inspired by their drive for agility and fearlessness, the e.l.f. brand continues to be early and often first on emerging platforms.
e.l.f. Cosmetics often talks about “working at the speed of culture.” A recent example of this is the Super Bowl earlier this year. The e.l.f. team’s cultural insight was that people who love e.l.f. also love White Lotus. While global brands spent months polishing their Super Bowl TV ads, e.l.f. underscored its focus on agility and fearlessness by concepting and delivering the finished Super Bowl ad within three weeks. The spot, which features Jennifer Coolidge, produced above-average positivity ratings and also earned millions of additional views after going viral on social media.
Agility and fearlessness — and proactively investing in their brand — have been good for e.l.f. Cosmetics. Earlier this year, the brand was awarded #1 favorite makeup brand for Gen Z by Piper Sandler. But more importantly, it’s garnered 16 quarters of sales growth and is well positioned for continued success.
To be more agile and fearless like e.l.f., we recommend global teams empower small teams of experts who: 1) intuitively understand the consumer; 2) are confident in leveraging best-in-class DTC tactics; and 3) who, like e.l.f., can “execute at the speed of culture.” These teams can then produce, measure using real-time data tools, and maneuver quickly by making decisions that are efficient and data-driven.
Summary
Thinking like a disruptive indie beauty brand can help recharge and more emotionally connect global brands with their consumers. Our CASE team welcomes the opportunity to spend a few minutes with your teams to dig deeper into this topic and to provide our POV on how your teams might consider executing more like an indie disruptor.
