Story Selling
To its loyal customers, Philosophy is more than a skin-care products company. It’s a lifestyle and an outlook.
“It’s also introspective and reflective,” says Sarah Superfon, director of interactive marketing and direct response for the Phoenix firm.
As a result, so is its marketing.
“Because the company is an introspective brand, it means something to people,” she adds. “Amazing Grace is our best-selling bath-and-shower gel. The philosophy on Hope in a Jar is ‘Where there is faith, miracles can occur.’?”
Superfon says the brand also reflects the personality of founder Cristina Carlino, who was CEO for 10 years following Philosophy’s 1996 rollout and is now executive chairwoman.
As part of cultivating its brand, Philosophy works to build a bond with customers by encouraging the women who visit Philosophy.com to share inspiring stories about their lives.
“We get amazing stories from people about how Philosophy has affected their lives or how they gave it as a gift to someone else and changed their life, or how it inspires them every morning,” Superfon says.
Until recently, though, customer stories weren’t posted on the site. They’d arrive via e-mail and if they saw the light of day it would be as testimonials in e-mail campaigns or product literature. Now these stories go up on Philosophy.com for other customers to read — but they’re also being leveraged for highly successful marketing efforts.
For example, in May the company ran a Mother’s Day contest called “Your Mom’s Philosophy” during which it invited site users to share inspiring stories about their mothers.
“The focus around ‘Your Mom’s Philosophy’ was to get women young and old to share stories about their mothers, whether they were 24 talking about their mother who was 50, or they were 50 talking about their mother who was 90,” Superfon says. “Mother’s Day is really big for us. Philosophy is one of the few brands where mothers, daughters and grandmothers all use the same line.”
To facilitate the contest, Philosophy used New York ad agency Dotbox Media and Bazaarvoice Stories, a new product from Bazaarvoice, which made its debut in 2006 offering outsourced Web site user-generated ratings and reviews. While firms like Amazon.com have featured customer reviews for years, Austin, TX-based Bazaarvoice was believed to be the first to provide outsourced review services.
Bazaarvoice employees manage one of the biggest risks of customer-posted content: They check each piece to screen for inappropriate messages. The company also handles search engine optimization for clients.
As of March, Bazaarvoice — whose customers include Dell, Macy’s, Office Depot, Petco, QVC and Sears — claimed it had served more than 10 billion user-generated reviews worldwide.
Using Bazaarvoice Stories, Philosophy invited women, through a search engine campaign and a series of e-mails sent to its six-figure list, to submit pieces about their moms. The company also sent e-mails to customers, asking them to read the submissions and vote for their favorites.
The “Your Mom’s Philosophy” contest offered a grand prize of a $1,200 shopping spree on Philosophy.com and a variety of company-branded merchandise such as tote bags and towels.
The result: Philosophy received more than 1,000 stories in just over a month and thousands of votes.
More importantly, 39% of Philosophy’s traffic in May came through the “Your Mom’s Philosophy” pages and 33% of visitors overall took the time to read stories while on the site. These same users also delivered 81% more page views and had a 20% higher average order value than those who came through other pages on the site.
Superfon says as much: “May was one of our highest-trafficked months on Philosophy.com. “People who went to the stories page spent more time on the site, had larger average orders and bought more items per order.”
There were two grand-prize winners and nine runners-up. “The ratings were so close between the two that we just made them both grand-prize winners,” she says.
Not surprisingly, thanks to the Mother’s Day promotion’s success Philosophy is considering more user-generated story marketing.
Superfon puts it this way: “We’re still planning, but we’ll probably do something around the holiday period.”
Magilla Marketing, Ken Magill’s weekly e-mail newsletter, is archived at http://directmag.com/magill/.
