Boosting brand awareness for new retail brand through highly engaging paid social strategy

Who

Harrods, the world’s leading luxury department store, recently launched a new brand of beauty stores across the UK called H beauty. These stores are designed as “beauty playgrounds” which bring together the world's best brands, interactive play tables to experiment with makeup, skincare stations for mini treatments, drybar salons for the perfect blow-dry, Instagram-worthy Champagne bars, and more.

What

Despite the store’s comprehensive offering and unique experiences, general awareness was low. The goal was to increase visibility among local shoppers and drive more store visits in locations across the UK. Timing was critical as H beauty wanted to build brand awareness in anticipation of changes in the competitor landscape in the UK beauty market; and launch the Harrods MyBeauty loyalty programme.

Planning Solution

Strong collaboration and platform expertise allowed Jellyfish to push performance further for H beauty. As a longstanding digital partner, Jellyfish worked closely with the Harrods team to build an innovative media strategy with highly engaging creative assets reflecting the core brand message ‘Discover your local beauty playground’. 

Taking learnings from previous campaigns the Jellyfish team not only evolved the media strategy but refined how they work with the H beauty team to ensure that media and creative were in perfect harmony.

Jellyfish used a ‘media outline’ to dictate the shape of the plan and to detail the specific and optimal creative assets required. This meant the H beauty creative team could be briefed early and guided to create assets that were uniquely optimised to each individual placement on the platform.

Creative was produced in collaboration using best practice (length/on-screen/sound/text) bespoke video content for optimal performance & maximising media effectiveness on Meta.

Media Solution

Rather than using automatic media placements recommended by Meta, Jellyfish reserved impressions only on high-attention, high-impact placements in Instagram (Feed, Stories and Reels). Jellyfish carefully controlled the budget on each placement to maximise the visibility of the video content. 

Jellyfish applied this strategy using the Reach & Frequency Optimiser tool on Scope to get the best possible CPM, and maximised impressions against the most valuable placements for attention, focusing on Reels.

The impact

The campaign performed exceptionally well with baseline awareness of Hbeauty rising from 9% to 20%. It achieved over 35.5 million impressions and 2.3 million completed video views. The brand lift study results showed that the campaign drove a 17.9 point lift in ad recall (+108% increase from Q3) against a retail norm of 7.6pt - 2.37x! - and a 3.6 point lift in intent to visit the store against a retail norm of 1.8pt.

These results demonstrate the success of the campaign in increasing brand awareness, intent to visit the stores, and boosting H beauty’s visibility in a highly competitive space. This collaborative partnership and clear process for optimal media and creative performance has contributed to the overall success of the campaign and will continue to support future media strategies.