Glossier: Seizing the Viral Trend
Deciding on our group project as doing campaigns for Fenty Beauty, it is important to understand our competitors. The first brand that pops up in my head is Glossier. It is one of the most topical makeup brands at the moment, and I know that a lot of my classmates take this brand as their project in other classes. I’ve been interested in knowing more about Glossier for a long time, and this is a perfect opportunity to find out.
There are differences between Glossier and Fenty Beauty.
Fenty Beauty is aimed at providing products for all skin types and tones, and it targets a broader audience.
Rihanna was inspired to create Fenty Beauty after years of experimenting with the best-of-the-best in beauty — and still seeing a void in the industry for products that performed across all skin types and tones. She launched a makeup line “so that people everywhere would be included,” focusing on a wide range of traditionally hard-to-match skin tones, creating formulas that work for all skin types, and pinpointing universal shades.
Glossier is more focused on young women, especially Gen-Z, and tends to provide a simple, natural beauty with a minimalist lifestyle. They usually don’t run big campaigns, but continually increased their brand awareness over social media, such as Instagram and TikTok.
One of Glossier’s big moves last year was the viral trend of their Glossier You Perfume on TikTok.
The objective of this campaign is to increase volume for the Glossier You Perfume and therefore increase online sales. Now there are 145.1M views under the #glossieryou TikTok hashtag.
It started from @bitcoin_papi’s post about the strong reactions she experienced while wearing the Glossier You Perfume. People on the street stopped her and asked her what scent she was wearing and she received a poem about it. The post received over 500k likes at that time. After that, it went viral.
Glossier reacted quickly with its years of experience with social media.
Glossier jumped on the momentum, using TikTok’s “Spark Ads” feature to boost organic posts about the product with the creators’ authorization, adding a link-to-purchase button leading to its DTC site. It used this format to boost a post by influencer @lyssielooloo, in which she referenced @bitcoin_papi’s viral post. In it, she said the fragrance had impressed her own boyfriend so much, he was “practically on his hands and knees.” She also called it a “men magnet.” The post received 1.2 million likes.
It was so successful that a Glossier You purchase has been placed every 37 seconds since the fragrance began trending on TikTok, and had sold over 1 million bottles of perfume since launching the campaign. Moreover, it helped Glossier to further enhance its digital marketing strategy by integrating its social platforms, UGCs, CRM channels and earned media.
Instead of a planned campaign, this is more like a clever reaction to social media trends. However, in this digital world that we are facing now, pieces of information ad content are spreading rapidly. Seizing the trend and transforming it into a successful campaign using social media tools are sometimes more important. In this case, Glossier is a great benchmark to learn from.
