British cosmetic & skincare company

Kaithlyn Dung Phung

Advertising & Brand Promotion
Professor Chad O’ Connor
 BRAND
Brand OVERVIEW
Introduction:

Founded over 40 years ago, Body Shop was inspired by the love of the planet, human
wellness, and beauty. Its name, derived from these three passions of founder Dame
Anita Roddick, has become one of the most recognizable names, harmonizing the
profit purpose and working principles. Its core value is cruelty-free, which means that
none of the brand's products or ingredients are tested on animals, nor do any of their
suppliers or third parties. Being the pioneer of social change, The Body Shop has a
solid commitment to fair working environment with farmers, suppliers, and its
employees with consistent support the communities thrive through their Community
Fair Trade programme.

By 2020, the brand desires to support 40 communities all over the world. Additionally,
they are on their way striving to develop a zero-waste packaging in long-term goal. In
fact, more than 68% of their current packaging technically can be fully recycled. In
terms of ingredients, the main sources come directly from natural plants, minerals,
processed by green chemistry, that reduce the production of chemicals that damage
the environment. For these reasons, The Body Shop was always known as more than
just a “beauty brand”.
 COMPETITION
As a pioneer in the field of social change, more and more brands are following the Body
Shop's footsteps and affirming their standing in terms of ethical and social responsibility,
including Yves Rocher, Lush and L’Occitane.

Yves Rocher: The brand was founded primarily in France, and

the company's missions is to become the most respectful
brand of women around the world and the planet itself. As part
of its positioning, the brand also depicts itself as ecologically
friendly, refrains from animal testing, and only uses plant-
based ingredients.

Lush: A handmade cosmetic grocer, the brand in-store

experience is an integral part of its positioning. Similar to its
major rivals, Lush is also against animal testing and focus on
green ingredient such as fresh fruits and vegetables. The unique
differentiation of brand identify exhibited through the colorful
visual component and quirky tone of voice.

L’Occitane: A premium beauty brand whose main target

customers are middle to upper class women with signature
smell of lavender. The brand ingredients are 100% natural origin
which goes with healthiness and genuine fragrances.
 ADVERTISING JOURNAL

WED MAY 12th

SPONSORED POST OF INFLUENCER
Sioejeng Tsao shared about her
experience with body image anxiety and
the way she protected her body health

WED 12th
SPONSORED INSTAGRAM POST ON THE BODYSHOP
ACCOUNT
Features the Body Shop has released their Avocado Body
Butter product

FRI MAY 14th

INSTAGRAM STORY
The Body Shop announced to launch new GIF stickers on
Instagram
SUN MAY 16th MON MAY 17th TUE MAY 18th
Question Box on Sticker package ONLINE BINGO
Instagram that allows available on GAME
staffs directly Instagram story Self-Love checked
responded to
list
customers’ questions
on Instagram video
story

WED MAY 19th

YOUTUBE 40s VIRAL CLIP THURS MAY 20th

Ads introducing the new product line: Body Butter FACEBOOK POSTS (Vietnam
96 hours page)
Seasonal sale to support
International Day of Biological
Diversity
 THURS MAY 20th FRI MAY 21st

SPONSORED POST OF FACEBOOK POST

INFLUENCER
The process of
harvesting tea tree
ingredient

SAT MAY 22nd SUN MAY 23rd SUN MAY 23rd

LIVE ON INSTAGRAM INSTAGRAM SERIES INFLUENCER POST

Talk with therapist and activist Self-love series by inspirers

MON MAY 24th

VOGUE POST
MON MAY 24th
Body butter and Love
#GoLoveYourBody
Your Body campaign
Hashtag on Instagram
featured on Vouge
Explorer
 ADVERTISING STRATEGY ANALYSIS

Portraying themselves as an ethical and eco-friendly brand, The Body Shop unique
storytelling tactics and advertising strategies have truly set them apart from the rest of the
beauty industry. Despite the chronological revolution in marketing, the brand has always
been consistent with its initial core value: social purpose. This implies that most
commercials have a very strong social focus. Using the brand journal as evidence, The Body
Shop is observed to target mainly to female customers with a wide range of segmentations,
including teens, working adults, and housewives. At the crux of brand positioning is
targeting the lifestyle that target customers are looking forward. Because of this, its brand
story is positioned strategically to meet the requirement of healthy lifestyle, social and
environmental responsibility through the use of exclusively organic ingredients and several
activist campaigns, remained up to now: Play for Peace, Come Together Act Together,
Isolated Not Alone. This is to say that even today a big part of the Body Shop’s marketing
and PR centre on storytelling, linked with their social causes. As part of their current
advertising campaign, The Body Shop calls on people to embrace their bodies with the tag
line, "Go Love Your Body" along with promoting their new product lines: Body Butter 96
hours nourishing moister. During this campaign, as far as I can see, there are many
marketing channels and strategies used in combination with each other:
SOCIAL NETWORK AND VIRAL MARKETING

Observed in the Body Shop brand journal, a significant part of the company's advertising
strategy is social networking and viral marketing, based mostly on providing valuable
content that provokes contagiousness among the public. As to introduce the latest
product launch - The Body Butter 96 hours, the Body Shop has publicized the current
campaign “Go Love Your Body” through multiple marketing channels. Applause for the
brand, as they have made an intelligent choice of spreading a message that reflects the
anxiety of many people about their body image. Additionally, this action is also seen as
the reaffirmation of the Body Shop to their initial commitment of redefining the beauty
standard and empower women around the world. Clearly, this campaign and the former
ones of the Body Shop aim to promote goods through raising customer awareness
instead of employing common sale promotion strategies, like promotional pricing, price
packs, or POPs.

The most active social platform of the brand is Instagram. The brand started off posting a
short series on IGTV with different self-love tips, given by many inspirers: actress,
activist, expert, fitness coach...along with the hashtag #SelfLoveUprising and
#SelfLoveJourney. They have also launched an online challenge called
#Berightbackworld, with the tagline "Busy Loving Myself", asking users to post their
pictures using the Self Love Space template on Instagram and tag them. A myriad of
photos from people around the world were sent to the Body Shop account with their
experience of self-love. GIF stickers are also available in the Instagram, allowing users to
embellish their Instagram photos. Additionally, the Body Shop representatives are
providing answers to customer questions directly on Instagram question box, gaining a
closer connection with customers. These results in the incredible rise in brand
conversion, visibility, and traffic.
 INFLUENCER MARKETING

Influencer marketing is another strategy which plays an important role in leading to

the success of social media marketing. In the modern marketing era, The Body Shop
believes that Instagram Influencers offers fresh, creative, and authentic content,
which fits well with their core value. Particularly, in the case of “Go Love Your Body”,
the brand prioritizes using micro-influencer, whose followers ranging from 1000 to
15000. Though their audiences may be smaller, they are more focused on the niche of
lifestyle and provide higher-quality content related to beauty, making them experts in
a particular field. Moreover, also due to the high amount of trust that influencers have
built up with their followers, influencer marketing is far more effective at driving
customer actions.

With Instagram, the brand is collaborating with influencer Sioejeng Tsao, Evelina
Forsell, and Maren Kissing in order to share their personal experiences and their
struggles to live according to beauty standards throughout their life. In their main viral
clips of this campaign, the brand also works with macro-influencers who have a
greater impact on mainstream audiences, including Soph Bulter - a disabled athlete;
Char Ellesse - a black lives activist; Gina Martin - a writer and Charlie Craggs - an LGBT
activist. As a part of its efforts to directly interact with customers, the brand launched
a LiveTalk on Instagram called "Self-Love is Your Superpower" hosted by self-advocate
Jameela Jamil and therapist Sara Kuburic.
 CONTENT MARKETING

Clearly, most of the Body Shop's advertising campaigns are aimed at raising public
awareness. Content marketing is implemented consistently over time as one of the
most common tactics. Basically, The Body Shop uses this strategy to achieve two main
advertising objectives: Reminder advertising and Informative advertising. In the first
objectives, The Body Shop intends to emphasize educational purposes by providing
customers with information about the brand's core value, brand story, product line,
and social responsibility via social media posts. Therefore, to maintain customer
relationships for more seasonal products, and also reinforce brand perception towards
loyal customers.

Particularly on the Vietnam Facebook page, the team had promoted their seasonal
sale by repeating statistics and facts about the adverse effects of animal testing. With
informative advertising, the company introduced the upgraded version of the Tee Tree
Oil product, without neglecting to inform their customers about the whole process
from harvesting the tiny trees to manufacturing them and how the Body Shop's
partnership with the Kenya Organic Oil Farmers Association has created jobs for
hundreds of Kenyans.
 RECOMMENDATION FOR IMPROVEMENT
As a matter of fact, most marketing strategies employed by the Body Shop team are
highly informative, educational and awareness-raising. It was reported that The Body
Shop had the greatest web search interest, with an average of 75 points in the past 30
days, compared to 42 for Lush, 9 for L'Occitane en Provence, and 3 for Yves Rocher. Yet,
despite generating successful traffic and brand interactions on social networks, SEO
process is not considered to be fully optimized. As an example, when typing in keywords
related to their latest product launch: "Body Butter" or "Go Love Your Body", Kielhs and
Paulachoice appears first on search engine results before the Body Shop website.

Moreover, it is also observed that there are disparities in social activity levels between
the brand fan pages across countries. In particular, the Love Your Body campaign is
promoted widely in the United States and the United Kingdom, but less frequently in
Asia, such as Vietnam, Korea, and Thailand. Overall, to reach a wide audience and
expand their brand to customers, The Body Shop should invest more in search engine
optimization besides social media marketing as they must also grab the attention of
various customer segments who do not use social media frequently. Additionally, the
Headquarter of the Body Shop in London might need a better coordinated marketing
plan for different subregions so that every region performs equally, effectively.

Brand Search Interest Over the Past 30 days in the United States
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