Vaseline Lip Care

The objective

Getting noticed in a saturated beauty space

For over 150 years, Vaseline Jelly has been a go-to for all sorts of purposes, from healing dry, cracked skin and lips to keeping razor blades sharp. Today, this “wonder jelly” formulated by Robert Chesebrough in 1870 can be found across an expansive lineup of products under the Vaseline brand.

Unilever International, the business team that is tasked with expanding Vaseline lip, wanted to boost awareness and increase the sales of its lip care line across multiple geographies—which is not an easy feat in the overly saturated beauty ad space.

Beauty and personal care brands need to stand out from the sea of competitors online, vying for potential customers’ attention while working within the crowded and limited space on popular social media platforms. But having creative assets that people want to watch is just the first step. To drive results, placement and frequency are key.

The solution

Capturing audiences through the 6 Demand Spaces Framework

Boston Consulting Group (BCG), through an analysis of consumer needs requested by TikTok, identified a new framework for understanding consumer needs and aspirations. They refer to it as demand spaces, and they found six: convenience, improvement, validation, recommendation, indulgence, and inspiration.

These six demand spaces can be segmented into two main groups:

• Functional demand spaces where consumers transact out of habit, focusing on existing products and services without considering new options.

  • Convenience (Easy for me)

  • Improvement (Better for me)

  • Validation (Confirm me)

• Emotional demand spaces where consumers actively consider new products and make brand switch choices.

  • Recommendation (Advise me)

  • Indulgence (Spoil me)

  • Inspiration (Inspire me)

Using BCG’s 6 Demands framework, Unilever International team ran a two-month campaign in five markets: the Philippines, Indonesia, Korea, Mexico, the Netherlands, and Australia. They tapped five to eight content creators in each market through TikTok creator-led packages to produce strong creative assets with engaging hooks and good storytelling while leveraging trends on the platform.

They also used Vaseline Lip Demand Explorer, a unique strategy pinpointing the top pressing lip issues across target markets so that creators can produce content that addresses users’ emotional and functional needs. This ensured that TikTok creators made content that truly resonated with audiences.

The Unilever International team used a variety of ad solutions to help their ads become more visible and more memorable for their target audiences. This includes TopView, a video ad shown to users upon opening TikTok. This gives companies a means to showcase their brand using high-impact, full-screen, and sound-on videos and ensures their ads are unmissable. They also used In-Feed Ads, which ensured videos landed on users’ For You Feed to sustain awareness past the launch, and Top Feed for Reach & Frequency (R&F) campaigns.

R&F is a campaign buying type on TikTok Ads Manager that lets brands customize audience reach and the number of times they’re exposed to the ads. Top Feed makes R&F campaigns even more powerful by placing the ads on the first in-feed ad slot that appears when users go to their feed upon opening the app.

The campaign also tapped TikTok trends to help increase view-through rates (VTR) and click-through rates (CTR).

The results

Phenomenal sales and impressions across key markets

The campaign was an astronomical success. It resulted in over 600 million impressions and a significant increase in sales across key markets—275% in Australia, 53% in Mexico, and 32% in the Netherlands.

The campaign created phenomenal lifts in ad recall brand association and brand preferences: up to 27% ad recall lift in all markets, up to 5% brand association lift in Korea, the Netherlands, and Australia, up to 5% brand preference lift in Indonesia and up to 2% brand preference lift in Mexico, Korea, and Australia. Indonesia also saw a 5% intent lift from the campaign.

Across all markets where the campaign ran, the brand also achieved above-average CTR and VTR. Compared to the market median on TikTok, the campaign achieved 472% higher CTR for Korea and 153% higher VTR for Australia.

Get noticed amid all the noise and achieve your brand goals like Vaseline did by leveraging creator solutions and adopting a strong full-funnel media strategy. With TikTok Ad Manager, a convenient place for advertisers to deploy creator-led campaigns, you can hit users’ emotional and functional needs.