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“Comments are everything. That’s where the truth lives, I think much more so than just looking at all your standard metrics of reach engagement,” said Jessica Grigoriou, head of beauty marketing for Unilever, about how she values and analyzes campaign engagement on social media.
Grigoriou was speaking as part of a session at Adweek’s Social Media Week conference in New York, alongside creative agency partner Evan Horowitz, co-founder and CEO of Movers+Shakers, about a campaign developed for haircare brand TRESemmé.
The pair developed a predominantly social-based campaign for the brand that mainly focused on TikTok activity and discussed how it was able to reach and engage consumers at various touch points.
The double bind
Focusing on the brand’s “Power Your Style” campaign that aimed to instill hair and image confidence in consumers, TRESemmé considered tackling the issue of the double bind—the conflicting societal messages and images that tell a woman how she is supposed to look, speak and act.
“We really wanted to encourage and celebrate the power of personal style, and to do this we wanted to understand what could be holding women back from expressing their personal styles,” continued Grigoriou.
To develop the campaign, the team mined social media comments for research. They analyzed the top 50 posts on Facebook and TikTok within the content feeds of “the top 25 most globally prominent women” to understand how they were experiencing the double bind through their messages.
According to Grigoriou, 92% of the posts met the double bind classification, and one in every three comments was negative.
“So when you think about, again, this person is authentically putting themselves out there—clearly, you’re posting something where you think you look great and you’re confident in—and constantly in your comments, you’re being shut down. And so for part of the purpose campaign, we had our creators do quite a vulnerable video post where they talked about some of those comments that they’ve experienced,” she added.
The campaign was devised with two components and objectives. The brand wanted to further its messaging around celebrating personal style, leaning into earned media and influencer messaging. The social campaign ran across the brand’s various platforms—TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter—with a focus on reaching Gen Z women.
The second was a traditional 15-second product campaign focusing on TRESemmé’s shampoos and conditioners where there was “no room” to focus on the double bind element.
“We wanted to make sure that it all felt cohesive. So within that there was an overarching umbrella message of power and personal style, but much more focused on product,” she continued.
Horowitz explained how to make the messaging taken from a TV spot feel “authentic” on social media, something he feels brands struggle to do. The creative cannot just be a re-edited version of the TV ad. He also outlined that the campaign evolved through examining the dialogue around the double bind issue, finding that it was already being discussed and shared through TikTok, even though that terminology wasn’t being used.
By exploring the comments on the videos of the women in the research, they discovered that people were judging one another, which led to the insight of creators being accused of being “too this” or “too that.” The next step saw the teams consider how to tackle the insight natively on each platform and to tell stories and experiences to draw connections.
This led to a drive for users to create their own videos using the power of audio. Social media users were encouraged to create and share content where they mouth along to the pre-recorded statement “I’m too this, I’m too that” alongside the campaign hashtag #MyStyleIsMyPower.
Building on the campaign
Another element concentrated more on TikTok engagement, with audio still featuring a consistent key element in the stateement: “It’s really not that bad. It just means a little… shampooing.”
This was adapted from a meme inspired by a song (featuring the voice of Barbie) that was popular across social media at the time.
“It’s a twist, and that is how you make the brand a cool brand, and that’s obviously how TRESemmé wants to show up,” stated Horowitz.
On why more brands should consider the comments generated across social media, Horowitz added his view that this is where “a real gem” of cultural insight can be discovered. “The best campaigns really originate in comments because that’s the richest opportunity for understanding what consumers really experience and feel,” he said.
On TikTok alone, the campaign hashtag has led to 100.3 million views while #TRESemmeMyStyleIsMyPower has garnered 83.9 million views since launch last September.
