How Garnier Drove Its Brand Equity with Three Wonderful Facebook Campaigns

With its headquarters located in the country of France, Garnier is a French mass-market hair care, skin care, and cosmetics brand whose parent company is L’Oréal. The company had originally begun as Laboratoires Garnier in the year 1904 but was acquired by the French company L’Oréal during the 1970s.

While having L’Oréal as its parent company has certainly played a key role in defining Garnier’s popularity, the skincare brand has had its own marketing strategy in place for decades. While TV was its main source of advertisement till a few years ago, the brand has quickly adapted itself to the rapidly evolving marketing landscape. And Facebook has played a key role in that.

So, here’s how Garnier consolidated and increased its brand equity across three markets.

1. Garnier Thailand

Garnier is a highly-known brand in Thailand for its serums, facial sheet masks, sunscreens, and body lotion, and was looking to boost online sales and improve brand loyalty for its products.

Their Objective

Garnier Thailand wanted to determine how to best distribute its budget between Collaborative Ads and brand awareness campaigns including photo and video ads.

Solution & Approach

To understand how to best distribute its budget in Thailand, Garnier worked with Facebook and the research agency Kantar to run a consumer-mix modeling study. Garnier Thailand’s study measured the brand’s always-on campaign of Collaborative Ads in partnership with its e-commerce platform, Shopee, over six months.

Optimized for the catalog sales objective, the ads dynamically displayed a wide range of Garnier products and linked to the brand’s Shopee e-commerce site. At the same time, Garnier Thailand also ran brand awareness campaigns consisting of photo ads and video ads that highlighted its products and linked the brand’s Lazada and Shopee e-commerce sites. To reach as many people as possible, Garnier Thailand served all campaigns to a broad audience in Thailand aged 18-45.

The consumer-mix modeling study found that a combination of Collaborative Ads and brand awareness campaigns earned more online and offline sales compared to either campaign running individually. People new to the brand responded better to the brand awareness ads, while previous Garnier Thailand customers made more purchases from Collaborative Ads.

Through the study, Garnier Thailand also learned that spending equally on Collaborative Ads and brand awareness campaigns during Mega Sale Days such as 9.9 and 11.11 yielded the highest return on ad spend. To implement these insights, the brand adjusted its ad spend for a month before, and a week after, Mega Sale Day campaigns. The study also showed that during non-sale periods, allocating the bulk of the budget to Collaborative Ads, with less on brand awareness campaigns, resulted in the highest returns for Garnier Thailand.

The Result

Garnier Thailand’s Facebook campaign performed outstandingly well registering 1.9X more sales (online and offline) from balancing brand awareness campaigns and Collaborative Ads, compared to brand awareness alone. Also, it attained 1.3X more sales (online and offline) from balancing brand awareness campaigns and Collaborative Ads, compared to Collaborative Ads alone.

Moreover, the campaign led to 12% more sales than expected when running brand awareness and Collaborative Ad campaigns together.

2. Garnier Malaysia

Garnier Malaysia ran a branded content ads campaign for its men's grooming line that featured live streams from 11 popular Facebook Gaming creators in Malaysia.

Their Objective

Garnier Malaysia sought to increase the number of men who used skincare products in Malaysia and wanted to test a new approach to growing brand awareness by partnering with gaming influencers.

Solution & Approach

To reach its target audience, Garnier Malaysia partnered with 11 well-known creators in Malaysia’s Facebook Gaming community who livestream regularly. For the campaign, each personality appeared on Facebook Live to talk about their experience using Garnier Men's hair and skincare products. Following the livestream, the personal care company repurposed the videos as branded content ads.

Garnier Malaysia worked with media agency Wavemaker to execute the campaign, which ran on Facebook and Instagram for four weeks. The team targeted the branded content ads to men in Malaysia ages 18–35 with an interest in online games and travel.

The Result

Garnier Malaysia’s Facebook campaign was a major success as it reached 3.5 million people with a 4-point ad recall overall and an 11.4-point ad recall among men between the ages of 35 and 44. Also, it registered a 2.2-point increase in consideration among men between the ages of 25 and 34.

3. Garnier Saudi Arabia

Garnier Saudi Arabia planned to use influencer marketing on Facebook and Instagram to complement its existing ad strategy on these platforms.

Their Objective

Garnier Arabia wanted deeper insight into the incremental impact of branded content ads on brand equity when they ran alongside its usual Facebook and Instagram ads.

Solution & Approach

Garnier Arabia partnered with Meryem Karim, a leading influencer in fashion, beauty & lifestyle, as well as a supporting influencer to create the branded content ads. Together with Facebook and its media agency UM, Garnier ran a multi-cell brand lift study to evaluate the impact on the brand equity of running influencers’ branded content ads at the same time as it ran its own “always on” ads.

This study allowed Garnier to measure the overall lift that each type of content generated, especially on ad recall and brand awareness. The brand lift study examined the three different media and creative content approaches and determined that combining both Garnier’s ads and influencer-branded content ads in a single strategy generated the most positive impact on brand metrics, including ad recall, brand awareness, message association, and purchase intent.

The Result

The Facebook campaign turned out to be a tremendous success for Garnier Arabia as it resulted in a 7.6-point lift in standard ad recall and a 2.4-point lift in brand awareness. Also, the campaign led to a 2.1-point lift in message association and a 1.6-point lift in purchase intent.

Wrapping Up

Despite the emergence of a plethora of marketing avenues, Facebook easily remains the most sought marketing platform for most brands. With its various features like mobile-first video ads, Meta Business Partners, and its messaging service, Messenger, Facebook offers brands plenty of marketing options to choose from. However, to capitalize upon the potential of this excellent marketing avenue, brands need a combination of solid marketing strategy and impressive content, which can help them create maximum impact.