StrawberryFrog Develops Best Marketing and Advertising Campaign for Beauty Brand
To market its blazingly original new franchise company focused on waxing, European Wax Center (EWC) appointed StrawberryFrog, the NY-based movement marketing firm.
EWC placed a big bet on a smart and modern movement strategy devised by StrawberryFrog, the same firm that successfully launched and built Sabra Hummus into one of the most prosperous food brands with a whopping 65% share against entrenched Kraft and Nestle brands.
The unique perspective on the strategy was the creative media that StrawberryFrog and partners assembled to create a sensation and one of the most successful franchise companies in the United States.
The U.S. waxing category had seen little innovation and was delivered by independent stores across the country. EWC intended to change that—dramatically. Instead of offering just another variation on standard waxing care, EWC was thinking light years beyond the sector.
Such a revolutionary service would need an equally fresh, unorthodox, marketing strategy—one that would ultimately mark a number of firsts for EWC. 'Revealing Beautiful Skin,’ authored by StrawberryFrog, marked the first time a waxing company flipped their business idea from being a hair removal service to a movement aimed to reveal beautiful skin, which tapped the 4.3 trillion dollar beauty market.
The strategy paid off in spades. The marketing delivered a lift in brand awareness that was astounding. Even better, EWC franchise owners attributed a lift in sales to the ‘Reveal Beautiful Skin’ marketing campaign.
So how was it done? We will shed some light on EWC’s bold, three-pronged approach to transforming the waxing category. The first challenge for EWC was awareness. StrawberryFrog had to get the idea of “revealing beautiful skin” out there as something people knew about and accepted. Inextricably tied to awareness was the idea of credibility. We had to move people from thinking, “We can’t talk about waxing in public,” to “My friends and I do EWC. It’s me, it’s cool.” Lastly, the brand had to be approachable. So, StrawberryFrog had to figure out how to make it fun, youthful and vibrant.
EWC’s movement strategy ‘Revealing Beautiful Skin’ was a framework to address specific challenges and transition from being a hair removal service to being in the beauty sector, allowing the brand to market itself the way the biggest beauty brands market, but with one important twist. The brand image created by StrawberryFrog conveyed a modern female mindset: empowered and confident with women in control of their own sexuality, rather than putting women on a pedestal and treating them as old-fashioned objects of desire.
The next challenge was to find the easiest way into the beauty world with a focused service offer. StrawberryFrog noted how Benefit had grown its massive business on the back of eyebrows. It also conducted an informal study and identified that brows were the best first trigger of purchase for new fans. We brought this insight to life in a focus on eyebrows that became our way of communication.
We brought in the innovative Spark Media to work on devising a modern and effective media strategy, and together, they helped EWC identify solutions delivered via a custom strategic recommendation: reach (to grab the consumer's attention), passions (to make the ad relevant) and confidence (to convince the consumer that the service is right and relevant for them).
The creative perspective: the strategy led to a content ecosystem used to engage the audience through stretchy content that ran in film, provocative out-of-home ads on Refinery 29, and other beauty blogs and magazines such as Elle, Cosmopolitan and Harpers Bazar.
EWC’s reach creative included 30-second videos that ran on targeted cable buys that effectively hooked viewers in. Once we intrigued our audience enough, they wanted to learn more and went to the EWC website and Facebook reservation app that StrawberryFrog innovated, but we had to make it relevant to ‘her’. The brand made the bold move to sponsor the national premiere of the movie 50 Shades of Grey as a platform to engage the audience in culture beyond the category.
The brand was in uncharted territory with no clear road map at the start, and over time, we built an extraordinary franchise brand with something so radically different to sell this time around, versus a hair removal service. We did this with a profoundly original creative approach to match. This campaign reaffirmed for the organization that as long as we really put ourselves in consumers' shoes and help them feel confident and beautiful in their natural self, it will lead to accelerated growth and millions of fans, rather than only customers.
The success was noted in the franchise industry, so much so, that the fastest growing national franchise company in 2018, Modern Acupuncture, appointed StrawberryFrog as its partner to help the growing company accelerate its trajectory.
Scott Goodson, CEO of StrawberryFrog
