Background

NIVEA is the world’s largest skin care brand, and its flagship product NIVEA Creme has been in the market for over a century. Owing to its nostalgic connect with the consumers, NIVEA Creme has been an essential part of many Indian households’ skin care routine. However, we found out that the cream was losing its relevance in our consumer’s life. In a cluttered market that is consistently introducing new creams for different uses, the usage of this iconic blue tin was deemed limited. This led to a stagnation in the frequency of purchase of the cream. To make a 100+ year old product relevant today, we had to redefine its value in our consumer’s life. The campaign objective was to create awareness about the functional usage of the product through a balanced communication strategy on social media thereby encouraging frequent usage and purchase.

Describe the creative idea

A cream born in 1911 was re-born in 2018 with the help of the latest trends in social media. We made our consumers the advertisers of the product and crowd-sourced the various uses of just one cream!

Describe the strategy

To make the product relevant today, we started at the heart of our brand – our consumers. Through social listening, study of e-commerce reviews and primary research, we unravelled our biggest takeaway – the versatility of NIVEA Creme. Although traditionally advertised as a moisturising cream, we discovered our consumers had many unique hacks to use this wonder in a tin. Thus, came alive, our campaign idea – ‘NIVEA Creme. One cream, many ways to care’. While the product’s usage was limited in each household, each consumer had a different way of using it. So we decided to introduce our consumers to each other’s Creme uses. We focused on an engagement forward approach to celebrate our consumer hacks. To reach out to a wider audience base, we chose the most relevant platform to them – Instagram and the people who create the most relevant content for them – social media influencers.

Describe the execution

We hand-picked our most influential consumers i.e. Instagram influencers from various categories (fashion, beauty, fitness, skincare) & life-stages (mothers and couples) to share hacks that demonstrate the versatility of our product. Our influencers kick-started the activity by using native Instagram formats like AMAs, stories, video posts, etc. to showcase their unique uses of the NIVEA Creme. We didn’t stop there! Our influencers invited their followers to share their uses of the NIVEA Creme. To further boost the in-flow of these consumer hacks, we ran a contest on the NIVEA social media handles. The responses poured in large numbers! We celebrated the plethora of consumers’ hacks to create a digital journal of the 70+ unique uses of the NIVEA Creme and short-form videos across platforms.

List the results

We leveraged social media the way it was designed to be used, as a platform for the voice of our consumers and key opinion leaders. We harnessed their collective wisdom and the credibility associated with it to find 2000+ hacks for NIVEA Creme, of which 70+ were unique. We reached out to 6.78 million users, engrossed 25% (1.68 million) of them with our content, and transformed a sentiment of nostalgia into everyday relevance for a 100+ year old iconic brand.