Last week I had the pleasure of traveling to Berlin to present at Savage.Z, an innovative marketing conference focused on marketing to the next wave of consumers: Generation Z. At the conference I presented the case study of the digital 360 operation that we ran last year at Shiseido pour the launch of Girls Can Do Anything, the new feminine fragrance from Zadig&Voltaire Parfums.
Marketing to Gen Z is hard, and many businesses are still unsure what to do or how to approach it, let alone come out to the public and talk about a success. But that’s exactly what we did, we looked at the challenges and opportunities for marketing to Gen Z and came up with an online experience that capitalized on all of the things that work.
Here is the Slideshare of the presentation, in my usual fashion there are a lot of GIFs where I explain things orally (the best way to give an engaging presentation), but I also provide the KPIs including media investment, participations, and the end impact on sales. Take a look here and let me explain:
When you talk about marketing you are really talking about attention, and Gen Z is no different from any other generation, it’s just that their eyes are in different places. On social we talk about attention in fractions of seconds, but there is a place where people spend tons of time: YouTube. So we went to YouTube and got France’s biggest YouTube star to be a part of our operation.
Andy has 3.5 million subscribers on YouTube and about 2 million on Instagram. She is beautiful, yes, but she’s gotten to her level of success because of her charming, outlandish personality and funny videos that she creates for her YouTube channel. That angle is crucial for engagement because she is not like other influencers who are essentially pretty mannequins hawking wears for brands on Instagram.
We asked Andy what was something that she had never dared to do, and she said jump out of an airplane (preferably with a parachute). Perfect, we were going to give her fans the chance to win a jump in parachute with Andy. The contest to attract her fans was on.
Now we needed a platform to immerse people in the world of the fragrance while at the same time giving them the chance to interact and try to win. We also needed a way to get people to go to the store where they could smell the fragrance (ah the joys of selling perfumes online!!).
We came up with the Spin the Bottle platform, where visitors could Spin the Bottle to try to win prizes and enter their information to participate in the drawing to go skydiving with Andy. It was fast, immediate, and easy to understand – perfect for Gen Z. And everyone who spun the bottle won something to pick up in store, either a tote bag or a sample.
With a very small media budget and some Instagram stories from Andy’s account we drove a big number of participants to the platform, with nearly 30K people giving their information for a chance to win the experience with Andy. Most importantly, we generate a high amount of traffic to stores, ran out of prizes, and became the top selling feminine fragrance for the month of August at Nocibé (our avant-premier retail partner). This is particularly remarkable because there was no other media at the time.
A big thanks to Savage for giving me the opportunity to come speak. Their next conference is over two days in Amsterdam in June, and if you’re a marketer I would highly recommend that you make the trip!
Tony Hymes 