Case Study: L’OCCITANE’S Christmas campaign

CAMPAIGN: L’OCCITANE’S
CLIENT: L’OCCITANE
AGENCY: PRIZM

Background: Brands always have a love-hate relationship with the Christmas season – sales may skyrocket because of the intense holiday demand, but they also have to compete with all the other businesses that are also attempting to take advantage of the holiday shopping frenzies. Apparently, a campaign without an outstanding marketing strategy is unlikely to leave an impression on the target audience.

Objective: Last Christmas, Prizm was the agency responsible for L’OCCITANE’s 聖誕“賞”旅行 campaign that rode on the theme of “travelling during the festive period”. Rather than simply taking an in-your-face advertising approach with an ordinary product sample redemption campaign, the emphasis was put on enhancing the branding image and festive relevancy.

On the other hand, the secondary objective was to boost sales during that period, through a lucky draw and a 360 integration with various media channels. Strategy and execution: Prizm came up with the idea of embedding a Google map gameplay into the campaign where users had to collect all the L’OCCITANE gift set icons they managed to find on the map. With each successful collection, the user would gain an entry to the lucky draw.

Thus, a virtual treasure hunt experience was created for the fans. By integrating the gameplay into a tool that users were familiar with, it brought familiarity and freshness to the users at the same time. This helped create a special bond betweenthe brand and the fans.

Key opinion leadership was already an old marketing concept – everyone knew about it and used it. The question was, how could brands use this concept to create genuine traffic and impression? Prizm laid the question on the utilisation of the KOL’s market value.

To create a sense of mystery and a WOM effect, Prizm decided to break the convention of working with beauty gurus. Instead, the agency chose to collaborate with two popular KOLs - Brother Cream and Celine Yeung, who had launched several posts on their official pages separately to provide fans hints on where to find the treasures. One cannot use an old formula to archive new peaks. The popularity of casts is important, of course, so are diversities. Brother Cream was a famous cat on the internet that had made appearances in a lot of promotional campaigns. He mainly adopted a humorous and localised tone on his page. On the other hand, first grader Celine Yeung was a new favourite among marketers in recent years.

Reaching a wide range of audiences that beauty bloggers might fail to deliver, the promotion content was more casual and indirect, which allowed a greater degree of flexibility and creativity. Together, they made the cutest combination and managed to attract audiences of all ages, thus developing a more diverse group of potential customers.

Results: Overall, in the Hong Kong region the game attracted more than 200,000 views, 3,000 shares and more than 10,000 participants with organic fan growth on L’OCCITANE’s Facebook channel during the campaign. Not to mention, the campaign was adapted to different regions, including Korea and Malaysia. Apart from the game, there were two more features to help drive conversions: bounce back coupons that were distributed to all users, as well as the direct links provided to the online store so users could make purchases easily – a strategy to drive actual visits to the brick-and mortar stores.