As an emerging brand in France, The Ordinary set out to build consideration and intent for their line of skincare products. The Challenge? The retail landscape had seen significant changes to consumer shopping behaviours. With major shifts like the rise of direct-to-consumer brands, the post-pandemic return to in-person shopping and retailers adopting hybrid models that encompass both brick-and-mortar and eCommerce solutions, the industry had grown increasingly fragmented. In the highly competitive health and beauty category, The Ordinary needed to navigate this complexity in order to set itself apart from the competition.
This started with digging into the research on The Ordinary’s three audience profiles: Skintuitives, Skinfluencables and Skintellectuals. The data revealed a number of key audience learnings, such as that they find skincare recommendations through moments of virality and turn to social media for discovery and influence. They are also heavy multitaskers, and value efficiency in their self-taught skincare journey. However, not at the sacrifice of quality, as they are discerning consumers who value effectiveness.
Understanding these audience learnings in the context of the increased industry fragmentation, we came to our insight which is just as each person’s skincare routine is personal to them, now so is their skincare shopping journey. Whether they prefer to shop through social media, affiliate retailers or directly through brands, audiences craft a journey that is comfortable to them and offers them both efficiency & effectiveness.
This led to our strategy which was best of all worlds, in which we would create a multi-retailer experience that enables audiences to select their preferred point of purchase for The Ordinary products. By empowering audiences to personalize their shopping journey, we would remove friction from the process and enable to shop for The Ordinary their way.
This first started by meeting our audience wherever they were. Understanding our audiences were heavy social media users and the role it plays in their skincare journey, we knew that social media would be integral to reaching audiences as they’re in the discovery phase. We spanned social platforms, partnering with Meta, YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest and Snapchat, ensuring that no matter which platform our audience was turning to for influence, The Ordinary was present.
From there, we needed to navigate audiences to a multi-retailer experience where they would be able to explore The Ordinary’s products and select their preferred point of purchase. On top of this, we needed the experience to be able to provide visibility into retailer performance in order to solve for the reporting gap and optimize across retailers. Only one problem, this experience wasn’t created yet. Insert our partner, MikMak.
Specializing in retailer partnerships and eCommerce enablement solutions, partnering with MikMak allowed us to create a single experience that brings all retailer options together. Not only this, but through MikMak’s retailer partnerships and insights platform, we would be given the visibility needed to report back and optimize on individual retailer performance.
Using MikMak’s technology, we created an immersive and interactive Point of Purchase (PoP) Carousel Unit, a seamless experience allowing users to swipe through The Ordinary’s most popular products. From there, audiences could select which retailer they wanted to continue their journey with, so whether they were interested in purchasing through The Ordinary directly or popular retailers like Sephora, they were one tap away from their preferred shopping experience. All social platforms navigated to the MikMak unit, ensuring all audiences were delivered the seamless shopping experience.
The results were outstanding! Through our cross-platform social media approach, we were able to increase paid ad engagements by 124% and drive 350% in CPC efficiencies, showing we were able to improve consideration for The Ordinary’s products.
By partnering with MikMak to build an immersive, multi-retailer experience, we saw an impressive 88% engagement rate with the PoP Carousel Unit, resulting in over 30K purchase intent clicks to retailer sites at a conversion rate of over 6%, surpassing global beauty and skincare benchmarks. This shows that by removing friction and creating a multi-retailer experience, we were able to also increase purchase intent for The Ordinary.
If that weren’t enough, The Ordinary saw a 117% increase in average order value, showing that they were successful in navigating the fragmented retail landscape and overcoming the complexity to drive meaningful business outcomes.
