Fenty Beauty Ad Campaign Analysis

Introduction

The ensuing formative creative report would be formulated with the purpose of analysis of the current advertisement campaign of the selected multinational organisation of Fenty Beauty. The structure of the report would be constituted through the background of the selected organisation, the analysis of the context of such organisational operations, the detailed delineation of the objectives of the organisational advertising campaign and assessment of the existing and targeted customer bases pertaining to the selected business entity. Furthermore, the core messaging themes associated with the advertisement strategies, the marketing strategies and management of the motivational factors would be effectively evaluated as well by the study report process.

The organisational background

The selected company, Fenty Beauty, operates as a cosmetics and beauty products and the current headquarter of the company is located at brand 24 rue Jean Goujon, Paris. The company was initiated on 8thSeptember, 2017 by Robyn Rihanna Fenty, the Barbadian businesswoman, singer and songwriter. The brand of the company is particularly popular in terms of the broad inclusivity it endorses involving differential genders and skin tones and this has been particularly highlighted by t he Pro Filt'R foundation. During launch, the numbers of offered foundation shades had been 40 which have now expanded to include 50 different shades with the inclusion of the Fenty Beauty concealer. The offering of this large variations of shades has been oriented towards competitive brand differentiation perspectives by Fenty in comparison to the various other makeup organisations which primarily have shallow focuses regarding the broader market category. The organisation had been included in the enlistment of best inventions by the Time magazine during 2017.

Context of organisational operations

The context of operations involving marketing campaign of Fenty Beauty is formulation of an inclusive perspective in terms of marketing of the organisational branded beauty products to targeted customer segments. The launch of the company specified the significance of inclusive marketing which could purportedly shift the beauty product commercialisation landscape.

Advertisement and marketing campaign objectives

Rahmawati(2019)has determined that the prime objective of marketing and advertisement campaign of Fenty Beauty could be understood as the enhancement of diversity within the greater cosmetics industry and this objective is also reflected through the efforts of the company to meet the necessities of 98% all of the skin tones globally. The organisation utilised celebrities, social media influencing personalities and paid blogger to drive the marketing campaign named True Match on the social media platforms. The research of Shen and Bissell(2013)has demonstrated that Fenty Beauty strives to present itself as an inclusive brand within the cosmetics markets which are ardently endorsed by different celebrities. To this effect, the reach of such branded cosmetic products has been increased to 115 different countries where the Fenty Beauty products are shipped to with 17 particular countries where the products are available at departmental stores. Cheung, Vazquez and Conway (2019)have stated that the initial extensive numbers of offered shades by Fenty, when the company had been launched, was meant to differentiate Fenty from the competing brands through putting across the message that the organisation under consideration is dedicated to include women, ranging from the lightest skin tone to the darkest one. Alleyne (2020)has observed this as a deliberate attempt on part of Fenty to highlight the fact that there existed no brand of beauty cosmetics products which could effectively reach every customer from every diverging category on the global level. Furthermore, Werle(2019) has stated that various undertones, such as olive tones of skin, had been underserved in the beauty cosmetics products industry prior to the advent of the products endorsed and offered by Fenty. At the initial launch phase of Fenty Beauty, greater emphasis of the marketing message formulation effort was concentrated on the faces of the targeted customer ranges within the colour cosmetics segment of the UK markets. This was based on the research findings of Stokinger and Ozuem (2018) that up to 35% of the female customers within such a market sphere utilise make-up for subtle enhancement of their features. This highlighted the trend of natural make up look efficacy. Thus, initially, the Fenty range included lip products and nude gloss products to accommodate women of every skin tone so that the extensively pigmented matte lipstics based trend could be successfully countered.

Consumer behaviour

Strategic business focus

According to Woo and Ramkumar (2018) the key demographic orientation of the marketing advertising campaign of Fenty is to target of all of the skin types which includes the female customers suffering from Albinism. This has meant that greater than 18000 customers of this category are currently directing their purchase behaviours involving Fenty products in the USA. The strategic efficacy of such an approach could be considered from the fact that those women who had been experiencing difficulty in terms of matching their fair skin with the previously existing brands of foundations due to the skin shades affected from Albinism, now could subscribe to the different branded products, including those of the foundation offerings, of Fenty.

Demographics analysis based on customer persona

According to Ismail (2018), some of the dominant customer profiles of Fenty beauty are maids of honour at the bridal parties (age group 22-25 years), the makeup junkies (age group 18-27 years), the birthday girls (age group 21-25 years), the bachelorette (age group mid-20s) and the party girls (age group 18-21 years).

Customer journey map

Awareness

Touch points determination throgh realisation of personal inclinations.

Unique opportunities provided by Beauty for all concepts of Fenty to consumers of every ethnic and national origin involving all of the skin tones.

Research

Undertaking of research

Searching options include Fenty Beauty deeper shade of foundation and product integrity history, customer reviews and celebrity endorsements on optimised search engines such as Yahoo and Google.

Paying visitation to the Fenty online beauty products repository.

Considerations

Multiple offerings evaluation regarding the core benefits provided by Fenty to under represented skin tones

Advocacy of Fenty of dark skinned female customers in fashion, intention to challenge the societal norms and standards of beauty.

Push and Pull marketing strategies

Push strategies

Experiential marketing based on event management

This involves management of the launch party of the different pop up stores at different cities regarding particular occasions such as Winter (Christmas) at New York, Summer (4th of July) at Lost Angeles, Autumn (Halloween) at London and Spring(Easter) at Paris. Such trade shows and first night launch celebrations have enabled Fenty to maintain marketing advertisement campaign longevity. Another push strategy benefit has been maintaining the measure of customer excitement through long term buzz creation in these events. Fenty had persuaded Save X line as a retailer to stock Fenty products during festivities at NYFW and at the Christmas edition of the Fenty World launch at the East Coast city. Such strategies further incorporated the colour and style coordination displays of Fenty brand involving singular products such as lip and eye makeup elements which are coupled with nightwear from Fenty Beauty.

Pull Strategies

Social media based marketing (Instagram presence of Rihanna)

Rihanna, the founder of Fenty Beauty, did not shy away from leveraging the fame she had garnered as a celebrity singer to further the social media based marketing strategy. This had culminated in the bolstering of the brand of Fenty products on the personal channels of Rihanna including the Instagram pages of hers which generated 1.4 million followers. However, the significant aspect of such motivational approaches involved the promotion of the blend of different content which generated testimonies and reviews various respected influencers of the beauty industry including the women with differential coloured tones of skin. Such aspects were accompanied with gorgeous shots of offered products so that the inclusive range could be displayed and such visual stimuli for the potential customers was reinforced with reposts by the existing customers while they were utilising the products such as wearing the cosmetics. The product line and social media based advertisement engagement of Fenty emphasised upon inclusivity which became especially visible in the posts uploaded by the company at Instagram and Twitter.

Motivational Marketing

Such approaches have been compared by Wilson and Suh (2018)with that of the model of transforming consumer behaviour through manifested and latent motives. This model involves intensive market research to determine the marketing strategy which could be inclusive of the most extensive measure of customer motivational management. For Fenty Beauty, the strategy involved delineating the target market (women of every skin tone) and the communication measure was also determined. The rationale of this approach has been outlined by Sparks and Chung(2016) to be the strategy to communicate more than singular benefits through advertising promotion to the targeted customers so that all of their motives could be satiated. This could be further observed to be the Transformational Motivation strategy through which high-involvement product (cosmetics) based customer behaviour management could be performed. This process also involved the promotion of the engrossing sense of inclusion through a well-crafted nuance of multiplicity of shades based product profile so as to serve a point of proof of including every woman regardless of shades/tone of skin within the brand profile.

Audio visual marketing

The interactive media based marketing strategy has been utilised by Fenty to provide extensive information through short video clips so as to attract the impatient millennial customers. Fenty utilised the brand appeals of fashion movies as the preferred audiovisual instrument involving marketing of Savage X Fenty line. The participants of the movie exuded confidence of high measure regarding their preference of endorsed products. The objective was to ensure that viewers of this movie could as well feel confident enough to purchase the Fenty brands. The film was rpoducecd and released one week prior to the product launch event by Fenty to gain the initial attention from the consumers and to formulate a discourse regarding the marketing campaign. The film involved models (female) of diverging appearances regarding their ethnic background and physic so as to drive home the inclusivity and diversity accommodation factors of Fenty products.

Leading tier influencer groups

Fenty effectively utilised the Star influencers (with more than 2 million audiences) and the Mega influencers (from 500K to 2 million influencers). The combined effect of such influencers could not be matched by the lower tier influencers in terms of the brand image development since these influencers have the largest measure of audience within the social media networks. Such influence effectively contributed to building of trust in the targeted audience regarding the brand of Fenty.

Interest manufacturing

In this context, Van (2017) has argued that the product range offered by Fenty after the lapsing of only a month from the launch of the company through the formulation of the Galaxy Collection, which highlighted the multiplicity of colours of vibrant eyeshadow brought forth by the company founder Rihana, was instrumental in acclaiming praise for the range of offered foundations which included previously mentioned 40 shades which encompassed skin tones from very dark to pale ivory. Roman and Emmons (2018) have outlined this range factor to be the empirical evidence of the purported inclusiveness of the makeup brand of Fenty. Furthermore, Bom et al(2019)have pointed out that the initial product offerings of Fenty Beauty had focused on the face of the customers with the various brands involving Concealing(Instant Retouch Concealer)(fentybeauty.com, 2019), Contouring(Match stix matte skinstick) (fentybeauty.com, 2019), Primer (Pro Filt'r Mini Instant Retouch Primer) (fentybeauty.com, 2019), Foundation(Soft matte longwear foundation) (fentybeauty.com, 2019), Blotting (Invisimatte blotting powder) (fentybeauty.com, 2019)and Highlighting products.

Desire Creation

To this purpose, Fenty has floated the idea of launching a promotional strategy based on launching of a print media based magazine since there are not current brand publications for any of the Fenty brands and the Fenty World does not take place in excess of 4 times per annum. This magazine would be published for one week in conjunction with the Fenty World events occasions seasonally. The publication would be provided to customers placing orders from the online stores of Savage X and to shoppers visiting the pop up stores. The content of this magazine would be inclusive of the details of the Savage X brand which would be catering to the specific season of publication. The content so far suggested involve seasonal letters from Rihanna, seasonal editorial colours and Christmas wish lists from Fenty.

Taking Action

This has involved evaluation of the overall application of multimodal marketing strategies by Fenty through online based brand operations to determine the success margin. For the improvement of the brand marketing strategy, Fenty generally invests in the enhancement of brand loyalty through greater tangibility of the products. The effective mix of audiovisual, print based and experiential marketing has been applied to this effect.

Media Impact Value estimates

According to Percy (2016), the market research series named as Beauty Brand Moment, had utilised the proprietary data evaluated technique of Media Impact Value(MIV) analysis during January 2019 for the purpose of evaluation of advertisement and marketing strategy of benchmarked brands such as Nars, Fenty Beauty, Anastasia Beverly Hills, Urban Decay, Laura Mercier, Smashbox, Too Faced, Kat Von D, NYX and Make Up Forever. The commonality of evaluation denominator for each of the above mentioned brands had been the leveraging of the influencers to generate greater effect on the potential consumers. The outcome had been the revelation that the cosmetics based industrial discipline formulated greater impact (55% buzz) on the media through the utilisation of influencers in comparison to the luxury (24%) and fashion (17%) industries. According to He et al (2016), the segments of influencers involved the celebrities, paid/owned media accounts, conventional media and business partners such as resellers and retailers. For Fenty Beauty marketing efforts, the strategic investment in each of these segments reaped adequate benefits in the form of $96.2 million MIV which had been the highest in comparison to the other evaluated brands with Anastasia Beverly Hills ($72.3 million MIV) and Too Faced ($65.4 million).

Leveraging their owned media channels

The utilisation personal media (Channels such as YouTube, Facebook and Instagram which are operated by the company)has been cleverly managed by Fenty Beauty with the MIV of $22 million. Emphasis has been on the video tutorials provided by Rihanna which had been persistently shared on the basis of user generated content. Through such approaches, the brand has engaged the community of clients across all of the available channels so that a 360o digital experience could be provided to the branded product users (Payne, Peltier and Barger, 2017).

Core advertising message themes

Cahyani (2017)has specified that the unique combination of diverse channels of communication, involvement of makeup experts and inclusiveness of personnel from every ethnicity and orientation as product evangelists has worked unprecedentedly for Fenty Beauty. One particular instance could be highlighted from the types of videos which are promoted by Fenty on the official websites of the company as well as on the different social media sites. These videos are formulated on the visual tutorial perspectives and these often include the featuring of major beauties such as Rihanna or Jackie Aina as deliberate influencers. In comparison to Fenty, other brands such as Make Up For Ever also fielded product offerings involving 40 shades. The ensuing rivalry in between Fenty and Make Up For Ever saw competitive Instagram posts where Make Up For Ever outlined that offerings 40 or greater number of shades of foundation had not been unprecedented since the company had been offering these many foundation shades since 2015. In response, Rihanna retorted that foundation shades offered by Make Up For Ever were deficient in range and would not be able to properly suit the tones of all the women and would make some of them appear slight greyish.

Reference List

Ismail, A., 2018. International Marketing Strategies in the Celebrity Cosmetics Industry: A Dual Case Study: Huda Beauty and Fenty Beauty.

Rahmawati, D., 2019. BEAUTY CONCEPT REPRESENTED ON COSMETIC ADVERTISEMENT. Jurnal JOEPALLT (Journal of English Pedagogy, Linguistics, Literature, and Teaching), 7(1).

Shen, B. and Bissell, K., 2013. Social media, social me: A content analysis of beauty companies’ use of Facebook in marketing and branding. Journal of Promotion Management, 19(5), pp.629-651.

Cheung, J., Vazquez, D. and Conway, T., 2019.Personalised and Participative Branding Through Fashion Blogging.In Social Commerce (pp. 59-81). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.

Werle, A., 2019. Beyond Light, Medium, and Dark: Diversity and Inclusivity in the Makeup and Beauty Industries.

Roman, E. and Emmons, S., 2018.Achieving customer experience excellence at seven critical life cycle points. Journal of Digital & Social Media Marketing, 6(3), pp.249-258.

Woo, H. and Ramkumar, B., 2018. Who seeks a surprise box? Predictors of consumers’ use of fashion and beauty subscription-based online services (SOS). Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 41, pp.121-130.

Wilson, R.T. and Suh, T., 2018. Advertising to the masses: the effects of crowding on the attention to place-based advertising. International Journal of Advertising, 37(3), pp.402-420.

Sparks, J.V. and Chung, S., 2016.The effects of psychobiological motivational traits on memory of in‐game advertising messages. Psychology & Marketing, 33(1), pp.60-68.

Payne, E.M., Peltier, J.W. and Barger, V.A., 2017. Omni-channel marketing, integrated marketing communications and consumer engagement. Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing.

Stokinger, E. and Ozuem, W., 2018. Social media and customer retention: implications for the luxury beauty industry. In Social Media Marketing: Breakthroughs in Research and Practice (pp. 733-755). IGI Global.