1: 🔎 Interrogate the insights 🔎

Like all great strategy pieces, social listening and analysis was our first port of call. We hadn't worked with Wella before, so we needed to understand the key motivations of our hairdresser community and what value they wanted from a brand like Wella Professionals.

2: 🗝 Unlock the opportunity 🗝

Burgeoning brands in the Hairdresser (HD) community were launching with a pure approach to social first content; hairdressers were sharing their love of their craft via First person point of view and 'shot on mobile' content. Wella, however, were still sharing static assets from traditional campaign shoots on social, trying to woo their audience with POS creative. Ultimately, their content mix was one dimensional – we added breadth and educational value.

3: 🚀 Insist a cultural and tonal shift 🚀

Insight told us hairdressers delighted in sharing content of their end-looks. They were creating culturally correct content on brand with Wella but Wella wasn't a big enough chunk of the conversation.

We took the strategic decision to move Wella away from campaign messaging and polished production to a route which championed authenticity and was 'hairdresser-first'. Our new content strategy had a simple focus on UGC from stylists, making the content more relevant in-feed, culturally attuned, contemporary and far more cost effective.

This was summarised in a dynamic mood-video, full of energy, which captured the new direction perfectly (see URLs).

4: 💋Activate the passion! 💋

Knowing hairdressers were our route in, we launched a brand-new Advocate Programme, which championed content-savvy grass-roots hairdressers to fuel a new wave of UGC for Wella.

#WellaPassionistas was born! A community of hairdressers who use the product every day. They're not paid but the raw, real deal and the best way to talk to hairdressers.

Homed in a custom community app, we set regular content challenges and brand experiences for our #WellaPassionsitas. We sought out educational and inspirational content, armed them with digital content knowledge to get the most from their UGC, which resulted in content shot with the creative knowing eye of a hairdresser.

5: ❤️Share the love ❤️

Once challenged and activated, our Passionistas shared their new UCG across their own social channels (largely Instagram) and consistently powered Wella's Digital 'always-on' content strategy. Providing us with the boundless content needed to post the demanding 7 posts a day on Wella's Global Instagram channel – required to maintain high reach organic reach KPIs.

Our always-on strategy is also supercharged through earned conversation and brand love for Wella shared by the wider community, who, Passionista or otherwise, love sharing their end-looks of their clients.

6: 🤝Integrate! 🤝

The Passionista programme is also integrated into wider brand comms. Instead of working with 'Super Stylists', Wella feature our Passionistas in their educational content (see URLs), Passionistas attended Fashion Week on Wella's behalf to host from a Hairdresser perspective and are co-creating initiative content hand-in-hand with Wella..

This cycle of hairdresser to hairdresser communication has revitalised Wella's social channels, empowered them to efficiently create content for a demanding comms schedule and brought them into the 21st century, talking to Hairdressers how Hairdressers want to be communicated with.