Rihanna was inspired to create Fenty Beauty after years of experimenting with the best-of-the-best in beauty—and still seeing a void in the industry for products that performed across all skin types and tones. She launched Fenty Beauty "so that women everywhere would be included", focusing on a wide range of traditionally hard-to-match skin tones, creating formulas that work for all skin types, and pinpointing universal shades.
In 2018, Fenty Beauty solidified its place as one of the most influential brands online dominating not only the beauty space, but across social media overall.
Our goals were to create an inclusive and close-knit online community executing Rihanna's vision to champion for beauty for all through our social media platforms and to constantly keep the internet on its toes by dropping funny, viral memes and marketing campaigns that have never been done before.
Our content strategy was to create authentic and entertaining content that we carefully execute with Rihanna, major beauty influencers, as well as unexpected and unique partnerships with celebrities who aligned with our brand voice. We showcased our products in authentic ways by having Rihanna show off our product launches in casual try-on videos. When Rihanna showed off a Body Lava application video on our Instagram and Twitter channels, it went viral— gaining over 7.8 million views and prompted the #RihannaChallenge around the internet which "inspired countless recreations from beauty bloggers and fans—the most hilarious of which are parodies coming from guys" (Elle, 2018).
We have also created viral videos leaning heavily into humor with comedian BlameItOnKway who showed off his different personas in a skit with our Mattemoiselle lipsticks, 'The Bachelor' contestant Ashley Iaconetti where we leveraged her notorious persona of crying on TV to put our eyeliner to a torture test, rapper Saweetie in our Super Bowl Budweiser ad parody, MTV 'Wild'N'Out' comedian YesImPrettyVee who showed us how she gets ready for a wild night out at the club, and 'Flavor of Love' reality TV star Tiffany "New York" Pollard who debuted our holiday collection products with a hilarious Holiday Gift Guide. These videos have garnered a total of over 12.5 million views across our social media platforms (Instagram, IGTV, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook).
Our engagement strategy leans heavily into reacting quickly to trending moments, memes, and challenges utilizing humor as ways to get other brands' and celebrities' attention and engage our audience. We quickly joined in on video and dance challenges like #NewFreezerChallenge, #LemonDanceChallenge, and #ZoomChallenge as soon as we saw them trending. We have also chimed in on viral memes such as the Ariana Grande lyric meme, Jordan Peele meme, Shannon Sharpe meme, tired Spongebob meme, "If you don't love me at my..." meme, and Cardi B meme.
Last but not least, we aimed to foster an inclusive community and prove through our social media content that we believe that Fenty Beauty represents everyone. We would constantly seek out people of different races, religions, sexual identity, sexual orientation, and skin tones to showcase them on our social platform and amplify their voices through reposting their content and working with them to create photos, videos, and tutorials.
In addition to growing our social media audience by over 4 million followers/subscribers in 2018, our content was constantly talked about and went viral, getting picked up by news outlets and celebrities:
Rihanna's makeup tutorials were written about by several news outlets including: Elle, Teen Vogue, HYPEBAE, Elite Daily, and Allure.
Our viral video ads were written about by several outlets including: W Magazine, Refinery29, Glamour, and Bustle.
Our memes have gotten the attention of brands and celebrities as we've aimed to do, expanding our reach. Most notably, Ariana Grande noticed us our meme and retweeted us, eventually leading her to mention Fenty Beauty on her "thank u next" album. Our community noticed too:
We proved that we champion for diversity across our campaigns and content. Outlets such as Glamour and Quartz wrote about the "Fenty Effect", opening the dialogue for the need of increased diversity across brands since we paved the way. Our community noticed too:
