When skin care brand Peach & Lily was crafting a social media campaign to launch its latest product, the team wanted the results to speak for themselves. Breaking from convention, the marketer avoided trending sounds and viral gimmicks that saturate the platforms and instead took a risk by sending the product — sans any and all branding — to select influencers for an effort that generated an engagement rate five-times higher than its previous campaigns.
Peach & Lily’s MiniProtein Exosome Bioactive Ampoule is a super-charged serum meant to firm skin and smooth wrinkles. For its launch, the marketer sent unmarked bottles to 14 influencers in July with minimal ingredient information, inviting creators on TikTok and Instagram to share organic feedback before the brand revealed itself July 31. The story-first, name-last approach aligns with an education-led marketing strategy that has helped Peach & Lily become the No. 2 prestige skin care brand at Ulta, said founder and CEO Alicia Yoon.
“Everything is about product first … it’s about being driven by solutions and being able to leverage innovation to create these solutions,” said Yoon. “We didn’t do it by chasing every trend or trying to do influencer marketing the way everyone else does it.”
Peach & Lily was initially created in 2012 to distribute third-party Korean beauty brands, but later evolved into its own line of products in 2018. The brand is often attributed to popularizing the TikTok-viral “glass skin” movement, a Korean beauty trend around healthy skin, after launching its Glass Skin Refining Serum. The Korean beauty market has seen major traction in the U.S., growing 53% year-over-year in Q1 thanks to high demand from cohorts like Gen Z and millennials, according to data from the Korea Customs Service.
To feed the momentum, Peach & Lily sought a launch strategy for its ampoule product that would turn heads but still resonate with its core audience, which ranges from those in their early 20s to those 60-plus. Social listening revealed that for influencer content, get-ready-with-me videos and product reviews weren’t performing as well as teaser content, Yoon explained. The Peach & Lily consumer base also gravitates toward education, which helped inform the remainder of the strategy.
“Marrying all of that together, it became very clear to us that we should work with experts — dermatologists, cosmetic chemists, estheticians, product developers,” Yoon said. “We want the experts to look at the formula, some high level notes about the product, try it out and have them opine on it with their genuine thoughts.”
The brand sent its product to influencers including dermatologist Lindsey Zubritsky, esthetician Morgan Antinarelli, cosmetic chemist Javon Ford, beauty experts The Lipstick Lesbians and more. Participants, who had the choice to enter a paid partnership following the product’s official reveal, received a dossier with an ingredients list and notes about the product and created videos speculating about which brand could be behind the new product and the effects it had on their skin, while commenters mentioned their own guesses and observations.
Notably absent from the influencer videos was the use of add-ons like trending audio — the content featured the experts simply speaking to the camera — a contrast from typical social media content that Yoon says differentiates Peach & Lily’s effort from the rest.
“While we have seen teaser content before, this specific format of teasing and mysteriously launching something isn’t something that’s done everyday,” Yoon said. “On TikTok especially, there’s a lot of content centered around trends, even when it comes to skin care education … but all of our expert partners, and even on our own social media, we weren’t leaning into that.”
When it came time for its reveal, Peach & Lily hosted a New York launch event with the influencer partners and over 60 other creators in the area. The reveal took a similar approach to the product teasers, initially lacking any branding to instead be themed around neutral white and glass accents. After guests had time to mingle, TV screens around the room reintroduced the product before Yoon appeared on screen to reveal Peach & Lily as the brand behind the launch. The marketer tracked over 1 million impressions within the first two hours of the event.
“The sentiment around it was both elevated excitement but also a real intrigue and curiosity and desire to check out the product itself, so we really considered it a success,” Yoon said.
The beauty of science
While a focus on educational content is important to Peach & Lily’s core consumer, marketing around the science of its products takes a carefully curated strategy, Yoon explained. Its new ampoule product alone is a mouthful, packed with a proprietary MicroMimic Tri-Signal Complex, exosomes and biomimetic miniproteins. To avoid the risk of overwhelming consumers, the team prioritizes meeting consumers where they are with digestible information. For example, a recent Instagram carousel explaining exosomes included high-level information, but a link in the brand’s bio led to a deep-dive blog post.
“We have so many people who want to dig in a little bit more,” Yoon said. “Our [consumer] psychographic, part of it is because of our own brand positioning — we’re trying to make things that weren’t possible in the past possible.”
In establishing a winning marketing strategy, Yoon also prioritizes a data-driven approach that allows the team to better track what levers are working and what can be optimized, she explained. In that regard, the marketer avoids viral moments, despite their potential for mass exposure, recognizing that such visibility is no guarantee of long-term success.
“The team is very focused on not chasing trends or trying to go viral, in fact, we don’t like to go viral,” Yoon said. “We don’t think that it’s a sustainable, repeatable, measurable marketing strategy that you can comp year over year.”
While social media was key to Peach & Lily’s latest launch, the brand strives for a balanced marketing mix, Yoon said. That spans conversion-based, bottom-funnel paid ads on platforms like TikTok and YouTube to top-of-funnel efforts, which have included moves like New York subway ads centered around the brand’s core promise. While not for every launch, Yoon and the team on a yearly basis considers how to fuel Peach & Lily’s top-of-funnel awareness as the marketer eyes stronger consumer loyalty for its next launch and beyond.
“It’s been really important for us to think about the mix of marketing across different formats and platforms, including in real life formats and events,” Yoon said. “You really do need to nurture the top of the funnel, but you also need to start driving revenue so that you start to see that conversion. We believe that it works best when it’s all kind of happening together.”
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