About Shu Uemura
Shu Uemura Art of Hair products are known for their artistic approach to beauty and rare ingredients, and they have quickly become an industry favorite among stylists and celebrities alike. Today Shu Uemura Art of Hair is found in the most luxurious, upscale settings, where the experience of beauty, art and style are celebrated daily
Goals
Stay Top-of-Mind
Activate Consumers
Drive Brand Affinity
Solution
We were very excited to work with Wyng so that we could focus on consumer and social content. Being a small team, this is an area we’ve always wanted to explore in order to drive more awareness with our target consumers, but resources have been limited. The campaign we launched, Gallery of Style, was the perfect way for us to leverage Wyng because it allowed us to highlight our artists in a broader way than what we can normally achieve in just the salon setting.
Through this campaign, we invited stylists from all Shu Uemura salons to create a Tokyo-inspired hairstyle and submit it to our photo contest via Wyng’s platform. After submissions were received, followers and fellow stylists alike were encouraged to vote for their favorite looks. As our grand prize, we offered finalists a trip to New York City and a chance to recreate their styles live in a Project Runway-style competition. Since our stylists are our best brand-advocates, involving them in this campaign helped us meet our goals of spreading awareness, elevating the brand as a whole and building a strong creative community.
PRO TIP: Take your campaign from social to omni-channel by including offline components as well. By driving salon customers to an online experience and providing a desirable incentive, Shu Uemura made sure all bases were covered which contributed to the overall success of their campaign.
One of our missions with this campaign was to increase shareability of each individual piece of content, and Wyng’s share functionality allowed us to reach an even wider audience than expected. Our overall performance skyrocketed as co-workers of entrants were sharing the campaign and encouraging each other to vote and offer their support. This was perfectly fitting with our brand mission, which is for “every woman to become the artist of her own beauty”—Shu Uemura also encourages this freedom of expression in her brand advocates. Our hairstylists are foremost artists and it’s through initiatives like this that we can provide them with the tools to move from behind the chair and grow and explore their talents.
PRO TIP: Even small brands can grow their audiences in major ways through awareness campaigns like Gallery of Style. By using loyal customers and brand advocates to help promote campaigns by sharing with their network, brands can easily increase awareness and drive engagement.
Throughout the entire campaign, we made sure that our contestants felt empowered to succeed and step out of their comfort zone. they were being congratulated for making the next round or whether sent a gift for just participating, we took great steps to make sure each contestant felt elevated and closer to Shu Uemura as a brand. While the main focus was to elevate our stylists, this was also a great moment for our entire organization to work together on one initiative. The brand marketing, ecommerce, digital marketing, education, and sales teams all played pivotal roles throughout the competition. This helped to build more unity in our organization.
We have already used some of the content we got from the contest in emails that are distributed to our email database to promote our stylists and help them gain followers online. We also had a consumer contest within this online competition. After someone voted for their favorite look, they were given the opportunity to opt into a contest to win free products if they agreed to give us their email. This helped us collect thousands of email addresses that we can now email on a regular basis to let them know about our online offerings.
Being founded in 2007, Shu Uemura is still a brand very much in this infancy. All of our launches and campaigns focus heavily on building awareness among potential consumers. Gallery of Style offered unique opportunities for PR, social media and word of mouth. This was a greater opportunity to not only gain awareness, but speak our mission of artistic hair expression. It isn’t often that a brand has the opportunity to focus on its heritage and core message in a campaign. Gallery of Style was the perfect tool for us to do so.
PRO TIP: By combining both photo contest and sign-up capabilities, Shu Uemura was able to not only engage their loyal audience, but they were also able to capture new emails and actionable insights about consumers.
Results
18,902
unique visits
7,488
link shares
22%
increase in Instagram followers
4,580
new email acquisitions
