When you hear Chanel, you automatically think of a luxury brand that carries beautiful but very expensive products. It is both aspirational and exclusive, and it’s digital media presence and traditional marketing campaigns show just that: from ethereal models and fashion films, to the cream of the crop of today’s young influencer set as their social media brand ambassadors. Because of this brand persona, it’s more than interesting that Chanel launched a new Instagram page @welovecoco dedicated to user-generated content. By tagging the page and the hashtag #welovecoco, it’s a chance for any eye-candy content to be discovered through the tags and for Chanel to connect with anyone in the beauty community, brand ambassador or not.
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As part of the @welovecoco launch, Chanel created an immersive four-day experience in Los Angeles. Their Instagram ads for the event read: “Explore color at the CHANEL Beauty House: 9169 Sunset Blvd, Los Angeles, March 1-4 #welovecoco.” As a team of experiential and hardcore beauty lovers, it was practically screaming at us to check it out. Seeing how popular experiences like Refinery29’s 29rooms and Museum of Ice Cream each had a price tag to them and sold out so quickly, we thought the chances of being able to go to the Chanel Beauty House would be close to impossible. But, we were wrong. Signing up was free and effortless, which along with adding to the testament of Chanel’s brand satisfaction, opened up the event to a broader audience as well. Hitting some great marketing points right at the start, here are some more of our marketing and experiential insights from the CHANEL Beauty House!
Impressive product experience
In the Inspire in Berry room, makeup vanity mirrors use AR tech to help you try on the different CHANEL lip shades without having to actually put them on. We don’t know about you, but we’ve spent countless hours in Sephora trying to find the right lip color and constantly applying and reapplying different lipstick shades. By the end of it, you just get tired of trying everything on and you leave empty-handed because you’re either too lazy to continue or none of them worked out. The AR vanity mirrors also allows you to take a selfie with the color on your lips, send it to your email, and reminds you of the name of the product you liked.
While Inspire in Berry was the first room that we believe planted the seed in doing some damage to our wallets, the rest of the house had a lot of persuasive customer experiences. From the lipstick swatching stations where you get to try on the products in Rebel in Red room to retouching stations in a couple of the other rooms where brand ambassadors fixed your make-up, the activations in the house were definitely meant to push the product experience and convince the event-goers to take the experience home.
User Generated Content Goldmine
The whole point of the @welovecoco launch was to bring the broader beauty community closer to the Chanel brand, and the user-generated content to the forefront. While pretty much every inch of the Beauty House can be deemed content-worthy, the guests are put to the test to see how creative they can get. In the Create With Colour room, you can create your dream flatlay using all Chanel products within reach. They had different products all dispersed on a white table- from their eyeshadows, to perfumes, floral arrangements, books, you name it! What better way for guests to tap into their creative side but also doubling as an opportunity of giving Chanel a boost in having their products posted all over social media.
In the fashion and beauty world, seeing user-generated content (UGC) is nothing new. Brands like Aerie and Urban Outfitters have had profiles dedicated to discovering how customers use their own purchased products through social media hashtags. According to Adweek and a survey conducted by earned content platform Olapic, “76 percent of consumers believe the content that average people share is more honest than advertising from brands.” People trust other consumers more when it comes to advertising and deciding what to buy, just as they love to share their goods and feel a thrill when the brands feature their tagged posts.
While UGC has been a part of many marketing strategies now, Chanel’s @welovecoco is still one of the fewer times we see a luxury brand launch a media profile that is dedicated to content made specifically by their audience, celebrity or not. For a luxury brand that relies heavily on its aspirational and almost unapproachable traditional marketing aesthetic, utilizing user-generated content is a way to make Chanel beauty products seem more accessible and relatable, if not ubiquitous in their Insta-worthiness.
Fuel Your Feed
The Chanel Beauty House was only open for 4 days from March 1st to 4th and only in a Los Angeles location but since the launch, the #welovecoco hashtag has already garnered more than 3 million public impressions on social media. That’s not counting all the selfies and boomerangs on Instagram Stories! From our team alone, our Stories were full of the pop-up’s recognizable sets like the claw foot bathtub full of pearls or the Chanel Boy Bag inspired pink swing. The posts and impressions from the 4-day pop-up alone should be enough to fuel the @welovecoco feed for a while, making sure Chanel will always have content to push out and keep it’s ever expanding audience engaged.
