How a Beauty & Skincare Brand Partnered with Mavrck to Activate Black & Latinx Creators to Gain Audience Insights
The Challenge
A sustainably-focused beauty and wellness brand wanted to revamp its brand strategy with messaging, brand positioning, and tactics that would appeal to culturally diverse Gen Zers and young Millennials. To better understand this audience and earn their trust as a brand, first, it needed to collect insight by leveraging creator partners who connected with this audience and had a keen understanding of their followers, values, needs, and aspirations on a community level.
Because this brand had worked with Mavrck before, it knew a continued partnership would help it make this introduction to an inclusive group of creators who grasped how social media creates and reflects culture, particularly for younger demographics.
The Idea
Because of its longstanding presence within the beauty, sustainability, and lifestyle spaces, the brand knew that creators active in these areas would provide valuable feedback. The brand pursued a mix of nano-, micro-, and mid-tier influencers with an established interest in an array of environmentally-conscious beauty products, wellness and lifestyle, environmental activism, and social justice.
Industries aside, the brand and Mavrck also understood that young, underrepresented creators would have a strong influence on the purchasing choices, trends, and cultural nuances experienced by the demographic the brand hoped to reach. To help it gain the insights it needed to better reorganize its brand strategy, it decided to hone in on Gen Z creators who are Black or Latinx, and who identify as women.
Mavrck and the brand were confident that this group of creators would be best to activate and achieve their goals because, in addition to their value as industry experts, they could show “how culture extends beyond beauty,” as said in the brand messaging. So, the brand and Mavrck proceeded with multiple touchpoints in their outreach plan to collect a mix of qualitative and quantitative research.
The Activation
Both creator discovery — sourcing and identifying creators based on the brand’s outlined persona — touchpoints were hosted and moderated by the brand’s consumer research agency partner. Mavrck coordinated all screening, outreach, communications, troubleshooting, compensation negotiations, and payment directly with creators. The first touchpoint was a 90-minute online focus group interview in an unbranded environment that did not disclose the brand’s involvement, to avoid biased responses. The agency asked questions centered around the beauty industry and its cultural impact.
The second touchpoint reactivated a segment of those creators to complete a survey, to decipher which beauty brands (especially within the clean beauty space), skincare brands, and retailers it felt would do well when it comes to inclusion and representation in its advertising and business practices. Then, creators were asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) to participate in one-on-one interviews, during which the brand was revealed as the sponsoring brand. During these more personal interviews, the moderator discussed the creators’ survey answers with each respondent while representatives from the brand listened in. In addition, Mavrck and the brand asked for feedback on creative concepts that the brand team had developed based on the focus group results.
The brand incorporated more inclusive practices by integrating its market research findings into its campaign plans. The information collected from authentic, raw conversations with influencers helped the brand to revitalize its strategy for a renewed commitment to more representative future content.
