Your daily drop of cool, Choose is a free mobile app and online concept store that brings users a curated selection of the beautiful brands while striving to promote positive initiatives for a better tomorrow. Since its founding in 2019, Choose has crafted a brand that's simple, human, innovative, and forward-looking. In this interview, Choose PR and Influence Manager Marion Bureau and Influence Manager Camille Leroy share how placing influencer marketing at the heart of its growth strategy is driving the brand’s success.
Marion Bureau: Influence is our primary acquisition lever. Our strategy is to use influencer marketing in a straightforward way to attract new users. After that, we work on loyalty by building communities brought in by influencers. For example, we’ve seen strong success in penetrating certain market segments, like young mothers, while others, like beauty, are less developed. By "market segments," I’m referring to categories tied to the expertise and focus of the influencers we work with.
At Choose, we are fortunate to work across all market segments. For us, influencer marketing represents an infinite opportunity. Recently, we’ve focused more on micro-communities, which we’ve learned are very powerful. We worked with a perfume brand on the app, for example, and the response from its niche community was phenomenal. This micro-community generated significant buzz around the product.
Camille Leroy: Exactly. At Choose, our goal is to offer the best products at the right moment, to the right people, and at the best price. Influencer marketing is not only an acquisition tool for us, but also a visibility service for the brands we partner with. That means the influencer actions also support the brands. When an influencer promotes a brand to their community, it creates both sales and awareness. It’s a bit like functioning as a media outlet; we act as the connection between the brands and influencers and in doing so, amplify both.
Camille Leroy: Mostly through referral codes. Each user on our platform has a unique code they can share. Influencers, in turn, share these codes spontaneously because they earn store credits when they drive new purchases. It’s a simple but highly effective system.
Marion Bureau: It’s an issue because at our end, we tend to say the ROI is positive and calculate it in a certain way, which is not the right way according to the finance department. It’s a complicated issue because we have a complex business model. There is a commission on our global sales; use of a code is imputed to a sale that has an invoice, an IP, which is the turnover. If there is no code on the sale, the margin might be smaller. But overall, it balances out and remains highly profitable because the volume of new acquisitions outweighs the cost.
Camille Leroy: It’s a valid concern. There are some profiles that refer everything, but it depends on how it’s managed. Our approach is to carefully match the right creators with products that resonate with their audience. For instance, influencers share codes for products they would naturally endorse anyway. We don’t push products that feel out of place, like selling baby items to a teen audience. The idea is to be super-targeted and ensure that the profiles we work maintain complete creative freedom.
When we work with macro profiles on affiliation, we never send a brief. We tell them we want to work with you because we like your content, we like what you offer your community and are convinced you’ll like what you see on Choose. They know their community best and they share what they want, when they want. For me, this goes to the heart of the battle. You can’t do influence if you don’t have a desirable service and product. If our catalogue is not up to scratch, influencers will not share it spontaneously.
Marion Bureau: We conducted a test with a macro profile, who we commissioned to make a sponsored post during the Christmas period, and which had a much stronger creative tone than the content that she usually shared. The results were very poor compared to what we were doing solely in affiliation with her. It was a confirmation that our customer acquisition strategy based on the referral system with additional credits for certain profiles was the right one.
That said, for Choose’s own branding and awareness strategy, we work with profiles that we know may not necessarily bring in new customers, but who are more active around certain subjects, and who deliver an image and a set of values that aligns with our brand image at Choose.
Marion Bureau: Yes. Both are completely different ways of running influence campaigns. We do not work at all with the same people for awareness as for acquisition, and the objectives and KPIs are calculated separately. Otherwise we would be trying to compare the incomparable. At Choose, we use influence to also support marketing activities on the whole as we develop the brand. We also do co-creation, and the Social Media team has its own style, which the brand awareness activities also support. It's not just about the numbers, it's about showing people and as many influencers as possible just how cool we really are.
Camille Leroy: There’s no rule as to the community size. In affiliation it can be very random: a KOL might have 10K subscribers with a crazy engagement rate. We haven’t cracked the code, we don’t know how it works but it works very well. Each month we recruit new profiles that could range from nano to mega-KOLs. We are selective about who we work with, their content and audience must be the right fit.
It's hard to say how many influencers we work with each month. An analysis of those we’d given a credit note to in 2024 showed it was about 400 over the year — in addition to those who share spontaneously — and they will all talk about Choose multiple times, sometimes as much as 150 times.
Marion Bureau: We have members in the team: one for strategic oversight and team management, another for influencer relationships, and a third dedicated to gift campaigns with brands.
The right tools are essential. We use Notion for project management, Kolsquare for influencer sourcing, and Ubu for managing direct messages. We’ve also developed internal tools for data reporting and analytics. Without these resources, it would be impossible to manage campaigns effectively.
Marion Bureau: I don’t foresee major shifts. Instagram Stories will likely remain dominant for their instant linking capabilities. For branding, formats like Reels and long-form YouTube videos will stay relevant. However, we always test new approaches, like private channel contests with influencers. The key is staying adaptable and innovative.
Kolsquare is Europe’s leading Influencer Marketing platform, offering a data-driven solution that empowers brands to scale their KOL (Key Opinion Leader) marketing strategies through authentic partnerships with top creators.
Kolsquare’s advanced technology helps marketing professionals seamlessly identify the best content creators by filtering their content and audience, while also enabling them to build, manage, and optimize campaigns from start to finish. This includes measuring results and benchmarking performance against competitors.
With a thriving global community of influencer marketing experts, Kolsquare serves hundreds of customers—including Coca-Cola, Netflix, Sony Music, Publicis, Sézane, Sephora, Lush, and Hermès—by leveraging the latest Big Data, AI, and Machine Learning technologies. Our platform taps into an extensive network of KOLs with more than 5,000 followers across 180 countries on Instagram, TikTok, X (Twitter), Facebook, YouTube, and Snapchat.
As a Certified B Corporation, Kolsquare leads the way in promoting Responsible Influence, championing transparency, ethical practices, and meaningful collaborations that inspire positive change.
Since October 2024, Kolsquare has become part of the Team.Blue group, one of the largest private tech companies in Europe, and a leading digital enabler for businesses and entrepreneurs across Europe. Team.Blue brings together over 60 successful brands in web hosting, domains, e-commerce, online compliance, lead generation, application solutions, and social media.
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