Ch. 18- Social Media and Marketing

Maybelline New York is the world's best-selling mass-market cosmetics brand. It was in fact the world's first ever mascara brand, invented by an Illinois chemist almost 100 years ago to make his sister's eyelashes look more prominent. The range now comprises an extensive range of other facial cosmetics, lipsticks, nail varnishes and applicators and other tools. It has been owned since 1996 by French cosmetics giant L'Oréal, who renamed it as Maybelline New York in 2004 to provide a counterpoint to sister brand L'Oréal Paris. The range is marketed in more than 90 countries around the world. L'Oréal also extended the brand's global footprint by merging it with regional cosmetics brands such as Germany in France and Jade in Germany.

The social media wave has spread in every section of the corporate world today. Companies rely upon social media for every major corporate actions that include branding, product promotion, recruitment, market research and consumer survey. There is a paradigm shift happened in the company’s approach too. Companies are not working towards building successful brands these days instead they are actively seeking to build social brands. Foxy Moron Media Solutions Pvt. Ltd, a leading digital marketing company, came up with this unique social media campaign for its client, Maybelline New York with the following business objectives on the agenda.

Maybelline also uses social media for the promotion. They decided to use Instagram as the campaign platform, a social media platform that would be highly relevant for Maybelline’s young and visually-focused target audience. With that, Maybelline steered a campaign using Malaysia’s Instagram influencers to create buzz within their target audience with the hashtag #DareToNeon. Using Instagram as the key network was a wise choice for the #DareToNeon campaign, since it is a fertile channel for getting hashtags to go viral, which was one of the objectives of the campaign. Using just one network to reach out to a target audience allowed the Lion & Lion team to have a clear focus for their efforts and strategies.