PROVIDING TUITION RELIEF TO COLLEGE STUDENTS
SITUATION
St. Ives launched its Skincare Solutions collection during the summer just ahead of back-to-school season. A change from their scrubs collection, the new products boasted clean ingredients to help their target audience - Gen Z - achieve clear skin and ultimately not stress about their daily skincare routine. The brand wanted to increase awareness of its newest range of products to this customer base in an impactful way while driving them in-store to purchase through a creative PR and influencer campaign.
ACTION
Research led to an insight that revealed 75 percent of college students were stressed about paying for school - and that stress can lead to acne. Based on this insight, I developed a contest - #StIvesScholarship - using a combined approach of influencer and earned asking undergrad students to share on social how they destress for a chance to win up to $50,000 in free tuition and books.
I identified the ultimate “it girl,” Sierra Capri, from Netflix show “On My Block.” Being a recent college student, she boasted a reach of 2M+ across both Instagram and TikTok, aligning with our intended audience. With the support of two macro-influencers that aligned with beauty and student life, they helped amplify St. Ives’ contest to an additional 1M consumers.
RESULTS
The contest garnered 18.52 earned media impressions landing coverage in 10 outlets including ESSENCE, HAPPI, Teen Vogue, Stylecaster, and Yahoo!.
With multiple unique pieces of content from Sierra in addition to our supporting influencers, the engagement rate was 18.7% - astronomically higher than the industry average of 2-3%.
Through the campaign, I seamlessly tied purpose in with St. Ives products to obtain more than 200 qualifying submissions over it’s one week duration which also led to growth across the bran’d’s social platforms. while driving consideration and purchase.
