Pronamel collaborated with influencers to connect its Intensive Enamel Repair product to the self-care conversation on Instagram.
Objective and Context:
In February 2019, Pronamel launched its most advanced formulation yet with Intensive Enamel Repair toothpaste. Pronamel is the specialty brand that protects tooth enamel from acid erosion, while Pronamel Repair helps actively repair enamel already weakened by acidic foods.
Pronamel aimed to create relevance of this innovative product by showing how easily it fit into consumers' existing wellness routines. People are tapping into the power of self-care to restore themselves, and Pronamel knew that Intensive Enamel Repair had a role to play in people's whole-body health.
But while self-care was a trending topic, oral care was left out of the conversation. With 50 thousand #selfcare mentions on social media in January 2019 alone, mentions of oral health accounted for only 0.2 percent. People were talking about the healthy foods they ate to take care of themselves, like smoothies and fruits, but weren't aware that those acidic foods can actually erode tooth enamel over time, causing dullness and discoloration.
Instead of telling consumers they have yet another health issue to consider, the brand wanted to show that Pronamel Repair helps solve this issue while seamlessly fitting into their healthy daily routines. The campaign goal was to show consumers that when used in a usual morning and evening brushing routine, Pronamel Repair helps to actively repair acid-weakened enamel so that they can continue eating the healthy, acidic foods they love.
The campaign sought to not only generate awareness, but also relevance, by creating an authentic connection between enamel health and the ever-growing trend of self-care. Success against this overall objective was measured by growth in awareness, household penetration, and sales of the new SKU.
Target Audience:
The brand needed to engage U.S. residents who assume their current multi-benefit, basic toothpaste brand is providing everything they need. This group is mainly comprised of women, between the ages of 34 to 54, who make their household's purchasing decisions and are often not fully aware of the effects of acid erosion on enamel.
Generally, the brand's target consumer has a clear vision of being her best self and constantly tries to bring it to life, while managing her career, family, and social networks. She has a holistic view of her well-being and is driven by the empowerment she feels after taking care of her health. However, she also tries to take a balanced approach and isn't rigid about her health all the time. She practices self-care and believes happiness comes from balance and taking the time to replenish herself after a busy day.
When it comes to dental health, she's willing to spend on quality products and has a set dental routine with special tools to help her achieve the results she seeks.
Creative Strategy:
Pronamel collaborated with a set of micro- and mid-tier influencers with credibility and engaged followers in the lifestyle, wellness, and dental expert space to help connect the Intensive Enamel Repair product to the self-care conversation on Instagram. The brand identified 400 criteria-matching influencers specific to the brand and campaign by leveraging deep machine learning algorithms and analyzing over three million comments and social posts through natural language processing. Quantitative scoring, weighting, and ranking were then conducted through proprietary AI models and using metrics like social influence, audience compatibility, and purchase intent. This data-backed analysis served as a strong basis that the selected content partners would drive results for the launch.
Strategically, partnering with influencers enabled the brand to explain the product benefits in an approachable way while staying relevant to the self-care conversation natural to people's lives. By leveraging a variety of content verticals, like fitness, lifestyle, and even dental experts, the creators tied the product to their own lifestyles with genuine testimonials that felt relevant to their followers.
Overall Campaign Execution:
Pronamel's influencer partners, who already had credibility and engaged followers in the lifestyle, wellness, and dental expert space, illustrated their personal self-care routines that include Pronamel Repair as a critical tool in their #RepairRituals. The creators tied the product to their own lifestyles through content that felt native to their channels and relevant to their own existing followers.
To complement the upper-funnel influencer content, Pronamel promoted product-focused creative highlighting the single-minded message of the new product's repair benefit. These lower-funnel assets leveraged a social e-commerce integration and a strong call-to-action encouraging consumers to add the product to their own routines, reducing friction between the ad impression and a possible purchase.
This mix of the influencers' lifestyle content alongside the brand's product-focused visuals collectively drove awareness and consideration for the new product.
Mobile Execution:
Tactically, Pronamel promoted the posts from the influencers' handles with paid support, while also repurposing content for the brand's Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest channels utilizing the brand's voice in order to tap into the unique value of each platform.
Creatively, the brand worked with the influencers to optimize creative for mobile viewing from the start. All content was created for Instagram in-feed and Stories by making the best use of those mobile aspect ratios and, in the case of Stories, utilizing mobile specific creative elements like giphy stickers, text overlays, swipe up CTA, etc. Additionally, since Stories are full vertical assets, they effectively took over users' screens on Instagram, driving brand awareness and user engagement.
Pronamel also adapted the influencer content for Pinterest as a search extension, hitting on relevant categories consumers are searching for on the channel, such as lifestyle and wellness, diet and nutrition, and oral care. The brand leveraged max width video, a mobile-only placement, to take up more real estate on the mobile screen and grab users' attention.
At the end of 2018, Sensodyne Pronamel was driving growth in a stagnant oral health category. To kick off a product launch in this landscape, the brand evaluated in-market competitor advertising and how to further distinguish Pronamel's advertising.
New entrants to the oral care category brands had begun launching modern, lifestyle-oriented campaigns to drive relevance with consumers, a tactic that increasingly included influencers. Pronamel had also started to prioritize Instagram as an advertising channel due to media efficiencies and the channel's visually-engaging nature. These aspects led the way for Pronamel to pursue influencer partnerships for Instagram specifically, including opportunities with authentic ad placements like Instagram Stories.
It quickly became clear that Pronamel's influencer content drove strong relevance with target audiences, with the whitelisted content driving a 71 percent higher purchase intent, 280 percent higher favorability, and 111 percent higher click-through rate than the brand's product-focused paid content.
Pronamel's mix of both promoted influencer and product-focused social content consistently drove a measurable lift in awareness through Facebook brand lift studies in 2019, most notably a 2.4 point increase in ad recall in Q2. Additionally, the influencer content garnered 142 million impressions, 115,000 likes, and 1.8 million comments with paid support across the year-long campaign.
Even in a stagnant category landscape, Pronamel surpassed its consumption goals in 2019 by 36 percent and exceeded its projected market share increase by 43 percent, effectively resulting in Pronamel Repair becoming GSK's largest global oral health product launch to date.
Additionally, the majority of Pronamel's influencer set performed better than competitive benchmarks in terms of purchase intent, favorability, and engagement and advocacy rates among followers. Followers also regularly commented on the influencers' sponsored posts indicating they wanted to try the product, and that the content had changed their perspective on enamel being irreplaceable.
