As a leading brand in many skincare categories, L’Occitane enjoys high brand awareness amongst consumers. But within it’s new target category of hair care, L’occitane is still a challenger brand, facing a market dominated by other major players such as Procter & Gamble, Unilever Group and L'Oreal Group. The market share of these top three groups has already reached a combined 53% in 2022, while L’Occitane has only 0.2% (Euromonitor). In terms of social voice, L'Occitane was relatively weak as well. Its search volume on RED ranked 20th with only 4.07% penetration rate in the past three months.

It would be wasteful and ineffective for L’Occitane to compete directly against these established big hitters in the hair care category. We needed a smarter way to cut into this competitive but promising space, and have users discover and consider our products without breaking the bank.

So we had an idea: hijack the dry shampoo space for a fraction of the cost, but promote our shampoo together with our dry shampoo, flanking the competition and quickly penetrating the target shampoo space while growing our influence within the overall hair care category.

We developed a 3-pronged strategy designed specifically for the RED platform:

1) Search Strategy: Dominate the much more cost-efficient search space within the dry shampoo category, bidding on category keywords and competitor keywords, with a special focus on the high overlap "voluminous" and "oil control" function keywords.

2) Content Strategy: Bundle our dry shampoo together with our shampoo products in all our targeted ad content, shifting our messaging to highlight the "voluminous" and "oil control" functions of both.

3) Maximize the reach and effectiveness of this strategy by working with relevant influencers to promote our bundle, doubling down on the dual product content strategy.

We developed a 3-pronged strategy designed specifically for the RED platform:

1) Search Strategy: Dominate the much more cost-efficient search space within the dry shampoo category.

2) Content Strategy: Bundle our dry shampoo together with our shampoo products in all our targeted ad content, shifting our messaging to highlight the "voluminous" and "oil control" functions of both.

3) Influencer Strategy: Maximize the reach and effectiveness of this strategy by working with relevant influencers, doubling down on the dual product content strategy.

Using this innovative content strategy to break through the gap in the fortress proved wildly successful.

1) Increased brand penetration in the overall hair care category on RED:

- L’Occitane brand search volume increased by 64%, climbing 8 ranks

- L’Occitane’s share of content consumption increased 225%

2) Improved L'Occitane shampoo product ranking on RED:

- L’Occitane shampoo product’s share of search impressions increased 42%, climbing 10 ranks to break into RED’s Top 60 shampoo products for the first time

3) Increased cost-efficiency in our programmatic campaign:

- The cost-per-click of our search ads decreased 38%, and our dual product content delivered 40% lower cost-per-engagement compared to traditional single product content

4) L’Occitane successfully took over the dry shampoo space

- L’Occitane search volume increased by more than 18X, climbing 19 ranks to become the Top 3 dry shampoo product on RED