CHALLENGE

Bare Escentuals, the make-up brand founded on consumer advocacy, was losing its competitive edge. Its sales had plateaued due to increasing competition at wholesale stores like Sephora and Ulta, and its perception as a relevant brand was dwindling.  

To spark awareness, the brand introduced its first-ever advertising campaign, “Rethink What Matters.” Along with advertising, there was a need to drive trial and sampling efforts on a mass scale, without sacrificing a quality experience.

SOLUTION

Bring the store experience to customers—in the street.

Heralded by street promotions such as wallscapes and posters as well as Twitter alerts tagged #rethinking, three custom-designed boutiques traveled throughout the United States to share the brand story and its product. A team of makeup artists providing free “quickie” make-unders, samples, and bounce-back cards enabled personal trial use and organic engagement.   

Email campaigns deployed to invite young professionals, students, and moms to visit the pop-up boutiques, and encouraged them to “share what matters” across social media and on rethinkwhatmatters.com, where they also had a chance to win free products.  

IMPACT

The size of Bare Escentuals’ Facebook community doubled in the campaign’s first two weeks. After two months, the web site received over 200,000 submissions and captured 43,000 email addresses. More than 35% of visitors to rethinkwhatmatters.com referred friends to the site (in comparison, before the campaign, the average tell-a-friend metric ranged between 8% and 13%).

The pop-up boutiques tallied 40,000 make-unders, 17,500 captured email addresses, and 600,000 coupons distributed to the target demographic. Altogether, the redemption of the marketing campaign was five times greater than any previous Bare Escentuals initiative.