CLIENT: BEAUTY BAY
CAPABILITIES: ADVERTISING, COMMUNICATIONS
BREAK THE
HIGH STREET
STRANGLEHOLD ON BEAUTY
Beauty Bay is an online beauty retailer, specialising in exclusive, boundary pushing, Insta-famous brands.
The brand came to Therapy for a killer idea to raise its profile and bring in new customers over the busiest beauty shopping period of the year: Christmas.
The challenge was to reach out and provoke UK beauty buyers – to call out the high street as a diluted, over-standardised shopping destination, lacking in seductive qualities such as creative imagination and stylistic cutting edge.
THE BRIEF
A MISSING CULTURAL LINK
Research revealed a growing separation between this category and a large segment of its target audience. Put simply, the beauty category hadn’t evolved in a while to accommodate the cultural needs of its newest consumers, who had come ‘of age’ for this category over
the last decade.
Culturally, mid-to-younger millennials (i.e. those born between 1990 and 2000) had
grown up in a culture fuelled by powerful, colourful, visual experimenters like Lady Gaga, Rihanna and Katy Perry.
The unvoiced conservative parameters of high street beauty had become too restrictive for them. They were looking for something to open up their cosmetic choices. They were looking for something to break the mould.
Or preferably, to smash it to smithereens.
INCITE A BEAUTY MUTINY
THE STRATEGIC
BULLET
For creative, original people with a personal approach to life and style, the enforced beauty obedience had gotten a bit tired. They’d been waiting for beauty to up its game.
They wanted a brand that would act as an accomplice in experimentation, a brand that could curate products for, and legitimise the pathway to, their own beauty mutiny.
This campaign was about making an impact in a cluttered and fiercely competitive category. It was about announcing Beauty Bay as the spiritual home for the beauty bold and the fashion fearless – available exclusively online.
The tone and style of the campaign was as important as the message itself: to shake the category up, we needed to capture all the edgy thrill and breath-taking excitement of a cultural incendiary, balanced with the elegance and charisma of a modern-day beauty provocateur.
THE BIG IDEA
THE CONSUMER
INSIGHT
THERE’S A NEW QUEEN IN TOWN
The New Queen in Town campaign was about smashing the rules, defying obedience and wearing your war paint exactly the way you want it.
Making its TV debut during the 2017 Great British Bake Off final, the campaign celebrated mischief-making and beauty exploration across TV, Digital, Social, Cinema and Outdoor.
The campaign was so extraordinarily successful at bringing new users into the site that the brand eventually introduced an online queuing system, so as not to overload it...
At one point there were over 200,000 beauty fans queuing to spend money.
