The Challenge

The skincare market is cluttered with high and low-end skin care lines, whereby the consumer is bombarded with the latest skincare trend, product, or ingredient often leaving the customer overwhelmed.

With the help of the trusted partner, Superdrug’s goal was to cut through the clutter and strip it down to basics, and show the consumer skincare shouldn’t be scary or confusing, and you don’t need to break the bank for good skincare.

Superdrug’s main challenge was to drive awareness of their varied ‘Superdrug own brand’ ranges and establish themselves as a trusted expert in skincare with affordable prices right at your doorstep. Many Superdrug customers go online or in-store to Superdrug to purchase competitor brands and overlook their highly rated skincare ranges. The challenge is to encourage existing and new customers to consider their varied own brand ranges for their skincare needs.

The other challenge was to shine a spotlight on all their key ranges: B-Skin, Optimum, Me + and Naturally Radiant. Each range is focused on a target audience and catered to a specific skincare need. However, some ranges are more well-known than others and Superdrug wanted to drive awareness of all the ranges and champion the ranges in their own right. Many of the products don’t have the credibility of many of their competitors, and there’s already confusion over the multitude of products available in this sector.

The Idea

The insight was that covid had changed many people’s skincare routines, people are spending longer on them and using more products, and consumers are actively using different brands in their routine and we wanted Superdrug to be one of them. Skincare has now become a form of self-care, there is a core focus on active ingredients in products across the category, and trust is more important than ever.

Superdrugs’ goal is to redefine their product ranges in their consumer’s routines, partnering with Marie Claire and Woman and Home, the idea was to focus on each brand’s USPs and educate the consumer on how they can be used to complement any skincare routine. Our routines are more complex and product suites are larger, but there is a lot of contradicting information out there and it can be difficult to understand. The importance of the ingredients in products has also grown & has only added to this complexity.

Superdrug and Future teamed up to create a multiple-layered partnership incorporating Future’s key beauty and skincare titles to champion the Superdrug ranges. Superdrug worked with Marie Claire and Woman and Home as two authoritative brand voices to elevate the ranges and ultimately drive reappraisal and purchase intent. Through this partnership, Mindshare leveraged editor talent, and Superdrug brand skincare ambassadors and created sampling opportunities for the audience to try the ranges.

Through this partnership, Mindshare created bespoke display assets, online videos, digestible instazine’s, and a range of focused online articles, Pinterest boards, and solus emails to cement the message that Superdrug ranges are affordable and accessible.

The agency worked with editor powerhouses, Lisa Oxenham (beauty and style director of Marie Claire) Katie Thomas (Beauty Editor) and Sarah Cooper White (Beauty Director) to create shoppable videos talking about each specific range. In addition a Masterclass skincare video was created with Superdrug’s Skincare talent Dr. Ewoma, to lend her expert knowledge on educating the consumer about skincare ingredients that are available to them through Superdrug.

Additionally, Mindshare created a collection of online advertorials, digital display across the Future network as well as bespoke Pinterest boards and solus emails to showcase the broad spectrum of the ranges. Each digital element highlights the product variety and how Superdrug can help to navigate the skincare minefield.

Each piece of digital content went out in bursts through the campign allowing Mindshare to shine a spotlight on specific ranges at specific times. The aim was not to add to the existing wealth of content that tried to fix everyone’s skincare routines, but to create a very ownable space.

Results

From a media perspective the campaign saw a large over delivery on all metrics measured. The most notable being the Marie Claire and Women & Home editorially led social stories, which achieved 115,811 views (45% over delivery). The Instazines had a combined reach of 1,255,058 and the Marie Claire Masters series (dermatologist led) delivered 297,544 views. These results suggest editorially influenced content performed extremely well and the partnership enhanced the consumer response to the content.

Digital Display used throughout the campaign achieved outstanding CTRs when compared to Future’s benchmarks with the Big Top Interscroller performing the best at 0.18% CTR vs a benchmark of 0.20% resulting in a 95% uplift for this format.

Pre and post campaign research also established impressive results. In terms of campaign Impact, the activity drove 63% recall exceeding a 55% benchmark. With the adverts achieving a 96% positive impression by readers.

Looking at the brand effect, all 4 Superdrug Skincare ranges saw significant uplifts, with the Me+ range achieving an especially high 192% uplift as a result of the activity. There was an uplift in perceptions of the Superdrug brand and products as the campaign significantly increased Superdrug’s Own brands’ association with the following values: good quality (+66%), effective (+48%), young/youthful (+53%), ethical (+108%), expert (+91%) and specialist (+240%).

Finally, from a consumer behaviour perspective, the content made people want to find out more and buy the products from Superdrug’ own brand ranges, with 90% looking for Superdrug online, 96% taking direct action and 4 in 10 people purchasing something from Superdrug following exposure.