The business challenge

During an initial meeting with Rimmel London, the Athleisure trend was presented as an emerging and strong socio-cultural trend, and subsequently identified as an area to explore relevancy. The aim was to create new content for use across digital, social and retailer sell-in for incremental, secondary placement.

The Design Process

Can a media campaign be created through Design Thinking methodologies? Yes.

Research

In conjunction with the Insight Analyst, we ran a rapid survey campaign on Facebook aimed at young (16-29) US female consumers, to gain insights into their Athleisure attitude and purchasing activity. Target consumers received promoted posts whose messaging and imagery focused on different aspects of Athleisure culture: tech, style and wellness.

• 88% of respondents said they are Athleisure trend-focused.

• Style messaging gained the highest average engagement with the content from the overall audience (1.85% CTR from Facebook), Wellness as a second (1.52%) – followed by 1.40% for Tech.

• Style had the most respondents and completes of survey. Our girl prefers her Athleisure as a lifestyle —one that’s not necessarily connected to working out.

Art Direction

I partnered with a Content Strategist from the Trends team in New York to begin exploring the visual directions for the brand. We discussed possible visual routes and the one that resonated was the concept of edgy street beauty.  

For decades, the beauty industry has been sold to women on two principles the power of transformation and confidence that comes from wearing cosmetics Women are more informed than ever today, and those reasons aren’t her sole point of entry to the category anymore. There’s a new generation that are more informed than ever, more liberated and have a wholly unique point of view on life as well as, ultimately, how beauty fits into their world instead of how they fit into the industry’s narrow standards.

Current brand direction

New proposed Art Direction: Edgy street beauty

But how do we use the new proposed Art Direction to showcase Athleisure?  All of our content will be designed to help answer the question: “How can Rimmel edge your athleisure look?”

Using existing Rimmel products we created three distinct trending makeup looks that embody the Athleisure aesthetic. Those would be used to understand what level of edginest is the most optimum the that consumers resonate the most with.
1. Dewy face – Edge
2. Peach lip - Edgier
3. Bold eye look – Edgiest

Production

The results

Meaningful Content:

With 88% of surveyed Rimmel users being Athleisure focused and 71% indicating they would find how-to content from Rimmel useful, the promoted Instagram post was the one of the most-liked in Rimmel’s history.

Retailer Buy-In:

Incremental, secondary online placement won with Walmart. The popular US retailer was impressed with our Brand+Retailer insights and content creation capabilities and proposed to collaborate together - they requested extra site content, banners, new web features and social assets for them to use.