Overall Skin Care Earned Media Value Leaders in May
1. Soap & Glory $2,326,319
2. Clinique $2,161,859
3. Neutrogena $1,702,231
4. The Body Shop $1,641,825
5. Clarins $1,509,263
6. Dove $1,480,559
7. Murad $1,206,557
8. First Aid Beauty $1,158,387
9. Estee Lauder $1,119,223
10. Olay $922,886
As considered in April’s rankings, the dominance of prestige over mass skin care brands continued in May. This month revealed clear demarcations in terms of strategy along the prestige/mass divide, according to Tribe Dynamics, curators of the following data.
Leaders in the mass sector focused their efforts on consumer facing campaigns that centered on empowerment. Neutrogena built their campaign around the empowerment that stems from information and choice, while Dove gave women the opportunity to feel empowered by challenging beauty standards with their own understandings of beauty. However, both brands’ interactions with influencers were largely composed of traditional, paid sponsorship relationships.
By contrast, leading prestige brands successfully cultivated meaningful relationships with established beauty influencers through thoughtful personal interactions, and carefully designed brand experiences. Additionally, these prestige brands excelled at communicating how their skin care products fit into already existing beauty routines, inserting themselves into established beauty conversations.
Brands that excelled in earned media in May successfully mobilized established beauty influencers to engage in compelling conversations that extended beyond individual products to holistic understandings of beauty and aspirational lifestyles. Each of these leading brands overlapped in their strategies to forge lasting relationships with influencers through celebrating the influencer, drawing connections between skin care and established beauty aesthetics, and integrating their skin care products into complete beauty routines. Soap and Glory, Murad and First Aid Beauty all put their own personal spin on their execution of these larger strategic goals.
Key Insights:
• In May, Neutrogena and Dove dominated the more traditionally consumer-facing channels, Twitter and Facebook (as opposed to YouTube and Instagram, channels favored by established beauty influencers). Both brands ran successful initiatives centered on empowering their customer to take control of their skin health and their own understandings of their beauty, with Neutrogena promoting the hashtag #chooseskinhealth, and Dove using #mybeautystory and #loveyourcurls.
• In May, Soap and Glory achieved a significant lead on Instagram, due largely to a singular product send of The Righteous Butter to a variety of beauty influencers (with followings ranging from 2.7K to 562K.) The brand created personalized packaging for each of the influencers, so that their first name was included on the label of the product itself. Of the $491.6K in EMV that Soap and Glory earned on the channel, $444.3K (90%) of the total EMV was owed to posts that emphatically thanked the brand for this particular personalized product. Influencers were unanimously surprised and touched by how thoughtful the gesture was.
To read the full Tribe Dynamic report on May’s leading skin care brands on social, please click here.
