The lip care category lost around 10% of its market size during COVID. Our constant masking and sheltering in place reduced customer’s prioritization of lip care: not worth the price, not worth the trip to the store, and perhaps most importantly not worth putting on when masked up or living in isolation. So when the time came for masks to come off, Burt’s Bees’ mission was clear—make people fall back in love with lip care in a full celebration of our lips, the sounds they make, and the connections they help build.

After a year of not seeing each other’s lips, Burt’s Bees has created an ode to lips, celebrating the ways we use them to connect with each other, and the world.

Burt’s Bees Lip Care: for lips, with love.

Perhaps even more than we craved normalcy, we craved connection. While self-expression in many forms kept us connected during a pandemic year, the truth is...our lips show the world how we feel. As we began to emerge from pandemic restrictions, Burt’s Bees believed it was time to show the world your lips. We set out to create a campaign that would bring people back to lip care & establish Burt’s Bees as their brand of choice in the process.

We created a campaign to bring people back to lip care & establish Burt’s Bees as their brand of choice in the process. In a series of vignettes featuring a diverse range of people and scenarios, we showcased the many ways that lips can help people reconnect, illustrating how they enable self-expression, self-care, and love. Burt’s Bees believes it’s time to show the world your lips.

The campaign launched in June 2021 as we entered a newly normal world. The 30-second spot marking the launch revealed bounteous lips doing what they do best – smacking, blowing bubbles, whispering secrets, and kissing. The spot aired on Hulu and on linear TV, online video, and social media with in-store displays. A creative variation was executed for the holiday season.

The campaign garnered strong earned media coverage with prominent hits in Adweek and Marketing Dive. Within the first 2 months, the campaign had a video completion rate (vcr), 84% on Amazon (the industry benchmark is 70%) and over 27 million impressions delivered on national tv. Lip Care search terms drove just over 98K unique on-site engagements. The campaign also delivered over 75 million impressions in social media impressions and another 22 million across CTV and DRTV during Q4 2021.

On Twitter, there was a 16% sales lift as measured by Nielsen Catalina.