From Home to Salon: Creating Personal Awareness with Kérastase

From a product for pros to a professional product for consumers: the background

Kérastase is one of the world’s leading luxury professional haircare brands that is a part of Loréal Professional Product Division. It is sold on e-commerce sites and in hair salons. We started working with their team three years ago, at which point our partnership covered their website and SEO optimisation, but it has since grown to include much more.

Kérastase has made a transition from directing marketing towards hair professionals, to making content directly for consumers on social media and other platforms. We’ve helped to implement Kérastase’s new marketing plan in the Nordics together with their media agency, and today have a much more holistic view of what’s created.  Central in our scope is that we adjust global content from Kérastase to suit the Nordic market and the Nordic consumer. Our partnership includes website maintenance, creative concepts, content creation, CRM management and SEO.

The product that this particular campaign was focused on was Fusio-Dose. It’s a deep acting salon treatment focused on solving two main hair issues based on an analysis done by a hairdresser at their salon, as well as the particular hair concerns the customer has experienced. The result is up to 30 different combinations of concentrés and boosters.

Finding a creative solution through collaboration: the approach

The foundations for the campaign started in late 2021, a period where restrictions for the Covid-19 pandemic had been common for a year and a half. During this period hair salons and hairdressers, Kérastase’s primary customers, had suffered a lot. They wanted to show support to those groups when restrictions were being relieved, and we wanted to help them drive people to salons again.

The first step was six members of the Nordic Morning team and seven from Kérastase meeting up for a full day workshop. We had already agreed upon some ground rules: Kérastase wanted to create awareness around Fusio-Dose, they wanted to increase their CRM data, and coming from that period of time where Covid had been a big factor in their industry, there was a desire to keep Kérastase partner salons and their challenges in mind.

We created no restrictions for the workshop and allowed everyone to think outside the box. We encouraged everyone to first think big, then scale down if necessary. That ensured a free creative atmosphere that made it possible to challenge the way we had approached campaigns together with the client in the past.

It also made sure the project would be unique, and meant we really created an atmosphere of collaboration from the early stages of the process. A wide range of disciplines were involved, contributing their knowledge to make the campaign as strong as possible. From Kérastase we worked with their Nordic Brand Manager, Division Manager, a Sales Representative, Education Manager and IT manager. And from our side at Nordic Morning we had a Creative Director, Experience Lead, Digital Analyst, Developer and Project Manager on board, so it was truly a cross-discipline project.

The target group was women aged between 18 and 60 in the Norwegian market – we set out to create an experience and customer journey that spread awareness about Fusio-Dose, increased Kérastase’s CRM data and would support their local partner salons. Among the big ideas which emerged from the workshops was everything from creating apps and running influencer campaigns, to holding pop-up hair salons and creating educational material for the hairdressers. Nothing was off the table.

Balancing engaging content with valuable data insight: the solution

In order to increase awareness we created ads for social media, while the consideration part of the journey was targeted with an interactive form and Q&A on the Kérastase website, delivering useful information about customers that could be used to tailor future communications towards their interests. In other words the journey we created started with the social media posts, before moving onto the website, then the form, salon finder and relevant email communication. That makes it sound simple but the trick was to ensure the whole journey was engaging and made the process of choosing the solution a fun one for the visitors.

For the content assets for example we had a range of different starting frames, so that the audience wouldn’t get bored and repeatedly see the same material during the rotation. The result was variety that encouraged curiosity, while at the same time being recognisable and aiding brand awareness. We used a mixture of video and images, video for their awareness suitability and images for their tendency to deliver a better CTR, focusing social posts on the unique nature of each ‘recipe’, customizable for each unique hair type.

Then when it came to the form, we didn’t want to just tell customers about the different combinations of hair solutions, but actually show it. Depending on how the customer answered questions about their primary and secondary hair concerns, the form would generate the beginnings of a custom recipe while letting them know that hairdressers could then fine tune it for them. The secret to this treatment’s success is the combination of the product itself and the cooperation with the hairdresser who carries out the analysis of the hair, so we made sure to show that. The reader is then encouraged to submit the form to visit a partner salon and unlock the solution that’s customised for them.

The form was also a great opportunity to inform the reader about the technology behind the treatment and highlight an FAQ with questions other customers had asked about Fusio-Dose. That has benefits that last well beyond this particular campaign and inform search, for example.

As with any campaign there is always some fine-tuning needed and some hurdles to overcome. Many people reading right now can relate to the challenges that can come up when you already have a defined technical infrastructure and set of tools that need to fit together with a new solution and journey.

Within Kérastase there is already a set of approved technical tools that ensures the right security protocols and GDPR details are upheld, so despite initially considering using other tools, we decided it would be more beneficial to adapt to the existing tools and functionality. Timing also proved to be on our side as the L’oréal Group had just rolled out Qualifio as a tool for gathering CRM data, and we got to use the tool for the very first time in the Nordics for this project. That meant we could create an iframe solution that lives in the existing Kérastase digital universe, and a form that could generate a clear variety of results based on the forms given.

An efficient campaign that inspired further collaboration: the results

When we looked at the results of the campaign we saw that Fusio-Dose as a product, and the interactive form, performed really well in terms of delivering CRM data about customers. Especially compared to similar campaigns in comparable industries. If you have a concrete figure about the value of a customer in your CRM database you can easily tell if the investment was worth it for your business and make informed decisions going forward. We saw in this campaign that the CRM sign-up cost was around €30 on average. That’s not a high cost, but we could compare it to other campaigns where it was possible for the reader to sample a Kérastase product for example and see a cost there up to 60 times less. That’s a valuable insight that can be acted upon in future campaigns.

One broader result of the campaign was it showed that it is worth continuing to challenge each other going forward, and we’re sure the Nordic Morning and Kérastase team will maintain this mentality, using and applying the concept and developing it further in different ways in the future.

And above all, we’re thrilled to have helped raise awareness about the hairdressers and salons who are key to everything that makes the Fusio-Dose product great, and work so hard every day. The Norway campaign served as a pilot, and we are going to see the Fusio-Dose project implemented and brought to other markets like Sweden, Denmark and Finland in the near future. We already have new content assets that we’re excited to try out, while maintaining the journey and interactive parts of the concept.

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