A massive influence campaign allowed the Wellcom Agency to successfully promote L'Oréal Professionnel's Steampod 4 through a careful selection of diverse influencers and the promotion of the product via striking video content.
Leading independent Parisian communications agency Wellcom has 40 years’ experience in public relations, content, brand management, and social media. To meet the increasingly complex challenges of the evolving digital and media landscape, the agency has combined its core areas of expertise to enable its clients to profit from 360° strategy advice and activations. L’Oréal Professionnel, is the heavyweight brand of professional hairstyling products and services that has dominated the market for more than a century. With professional hair stylists and science at the heart of the brand’s DNA, L’Oréal Professionnel offers cutting-edge coloring, haircare and styling solutions for every hair type.
First released in 2012, L’Oréal Professionnel’s Steampod hair straighteners have continued to wow customers with its revolutionary stream technology that delivers salon-worthy hairstyles every time. For Christmas 2022, the brand had released Steampod 4, a significantly improved model that delivered hefty improvements in performance and functionality. L’Oréal Professionnel mandated Wellcom to generate awareness of the product and position it as the must-have gift in the run-up to Christmas.
The busy end-of-year Christmas season is immensely important and notoriously tricky for beauty brands. Peak gift giving season means everyone wants a slice of the action. Standing out amongst the avalanche of social media content being delivered about beauty products is a key challenge. With this in mind, Wellcom settled on a strategy that would see it flood social media with quality content espousing the benefits of Steampod 4 for any and all hair types.
To this end, it was decided that the launch of Steampod 4 would be supported by a massive influence campaign: 80 influencers — micros, macros and top — would be gifted the product to review in video format.
From there, the questions were twofold: how to target the right influencers, and how to ensure they would reach consumers with all hair types?
Relying solely on gifting — no influencers were paid — meant ensuring influencers sent the product would be interested in using it. Wellcom also needed to ensure influencers ticked all the hair-type boxes, from long hair, to textured, curly, thick… For this, conducting a thorough selection process including content and audience analysis was essential.
"Kolsquare was indispensable for the selection process,” comments Wellcom Consulting Director in charge of Influence Strategies Charlotte Caron. “If you’re doing a campaign with 10 influencers, sure, you can lean on your own knowledge of the sector and profiles to find them. But when you need to activate 100 on multiple networks including Instagram, YouTube and TikTok, it’s another ballgame entirely. Honestly, we couldn’t have done it without Kolsquare.”
Within days, Wellcom had selected 80 influencers for the campaign, qualified them and sent them the product to test. Amongst the pool were 36 Instagram profiles with audiences ranging from 58k to 1.9m followers, 30 TikTok profiles with audiences from 82.8K to 2.7m, and 14 YouTube profiles with audiences from 50.3K to 463K followers.
The premium price positioning of the L’Oréal Professionnel Steampod 4 is more than justified by the fact it is jam packed with innovative technology and features. The Steampod 4 incorporates external curling irons, larger ceramic plates for more even styling from root to tip, and a built-in water reservoir.
But the product's standout feature by a large margin is undoubtedly the patented L’Oréal Professionnel steam technology. Conventional straighteners rely on electricity as the heat source, which anybody who has used straighteners and curling irons on a regular basis knows can be incredibly damaging to hair.
Using steam technology as the heat source is significantly more gentle and less damaging for hair, while at the same time delivering a faster, smoother result.
There are some very good reasons that video has become the favored format of influencer marketers and KOLs alike. Key amongst them is that what you see is what you get. L’Oréal Professionnel knows how good its product is because it developed it, and the best way to communicate that to potential customers is to show it in action.
“We knew that influencer videos that showed people using the Steampod 4 would be very powerful in convincing customers of just how good the product is,” comments Charlotte Caron of Wellcom.
With the exception of one static Instagram post, the Steampod 4 campaign delivered video content, including Reels, Stories, TikToks, and YouTube shorts and long formats. The content almost exclusively shows women thrilled with how easy the Steampod 4 is to use and the results delivered.
“With Kolsquare, we set up notifications to follow and collect all the content as it landed. It was really exciting, because we could see the impact the product and the videos were having in real time. Some of the influencers were really blown away by how well it worked,” comments Wellcom’s Charlotte Caron.
The Wellcom/L’Oréal Professionnel Steampod 4 influencer marketing campaign is clear proof that when done right, a strategy that floods the networks with content can be very powerful.
In this case, using Kolsquare to search and research the right KOLs prior to gifting the product ensured that those who were activated by Wellcom had a real interest and need for the product. Being able to quickly analyze audience demographics of 80 KOLs using Kolsquare also ensured that the right people in the right market were being targeted for the campaign.
“The results speak for themselves. Not only did the campaign achieve massive reach, but the audience was really receptive. 35K engagements on 150 contents is huge,” comments Wellcom’s Charlotte Caron.
“L’Oréal Professionnel was really impressed. Thanks to Kolsquare, we were able to show them detailed reports of the campaign, including all the best content it generated. We’ll definitely run this kind of campaign again for product launches.”
(NB: This campaign took place in 2022, before the introduction of French laws requiring that content generated from gifting campaigns carry partnership labels.)
