In recent years, cosmetics and skincare brand seem to be increasingly focusing on integrating customers’ concerning topic into marketing. Meanwhile, more and more consumers begun to take service experience and value recognition into account when choosing the brands. As for most female consumers, the one that impresses most is often related to women’s inner world and female power. It is worth mentioning that the skincare brand SK-II has taken many bold attempts in this field and received lots of positive feedbacks. I’d like to use their recent campaign #BareSkinProject to analyze their marketing strategies and how did this interact with Sheconomy.
What is Sheconomy?
Sheconomy emerged around 2010, along with the improvement of women’s social status and economic strength, suggested by Morgan Stanley Research. Different from the pink economy, which targeting a certain group as major consumption power, Sheconomy more concerns about female’s living conditions and reflects on marketing strategies. As a consumer myself, I would be more touched when I see a brand really care about women’s dilemma in their campaign, rather than simply use pink appearance to draw our attentions.
#BareSkinProject
In this project, SK-II invited six actresses to take a bold try by revealing their bare skin to the public.
Tang Wei, Ni Ni, Chun Xia
In this set of photography, all these six actresses didn’t use foundation on the skin, and the only ally was SK-II Facial Treatment Essence. As the photo and video above shows, although Chloe expressed many concerns before shooting, she was quite satisfied with the healthy and natural looking in the end.
As a commercial promotion, I personally think it was very successful. The starting point of this campaign was to show the effect of the Facial Treatment Essence, and what could be more convincing than the bare skin? Especially when it comes to celebrities, people have a natural curiosity for those stunning stars, which brings more attention to this campaign.
Alongside this, the call for natural beauty of women is also a currently debating. On Douyin, there is a challenge called #RejectAppearanceAnxiety, in which girls put their original and filtered photos together. This challenge page racked up over a billion views, which is enough to show how female are paying attention to appearance anxiety. And #BareSkinProject is just calling people to stop anxiety.
What is under the Bare Skin?
Back to the question in title: what is under the bare skin? For this campaign, we can say it starts with a well-meaning point, it encourages female to face the true self. However, when we see those celebrities still looking gorgeous with bare skin, will this arouse a new kind of anxiety? The truth that the photography didn’t reveal is that behind their perfect bare skin, there are high spending on skincare and professional lighting from world-renowned photographer.
As a brand campaign, #BareSkinProject inevitably has commercial attributes and ultimately serves the interest of SK-II. The core of #BareSkinProject is not to encourage women to have no makeup and pursue natural beauty. It is used to reflect the effect of product. However, this campaign releases more implicit meaning during the process of dissemination. However, this campaign releases more implicit meaning during the process of dissemination. It breaks the stereotype of beauty and brings up a new definition of feminine beauty. My point here is we should treat the commercial campaign critically, to see what is truly under the bare skin.