Luxury Content Marketing & TikTok Campaigns
This post was first published on April 13, 2020.
Why A TikTok Strategy Matters In 2020 Luxury Branding
About a month ago, I created a TikTok account. Not for personal use, but to see how it works in general and trying to “debunk” its broad appeal for Gen Z customers. Since its launch three years ago, TikTok has been downloaded over a billion times and has over 500 million global users. In comparison, Instagram had 100 million users three years after their launch in 2013. Even though times have changed, including on how marketing and social media interact, this is an interesting comparison to have.
Brands like Celine, Prada & Ralph Lauren embrace TikTok
ik Tok provides its users a platform of unfiltered, candid videos under 60 seconds long, with the more popular ones being shorter. While short videos are nothing new on the social media scene, Tik Tok comes without a heavy dose of advertising and without a crowd of “established influencers” as Vogue Business put it.
“Luxury brands used to sit back and watch everyone else jump on a trend, then would have to play catch up … We are in a different time where smart marketers don’t want to be the last to move.”
In December, fashion house Celine announced its new face - Noen Eubanks, influencer and Tik Tok star with over 7 million followers and best known for his lip sync videos, according to Business Insider. There is also the case of 15-year-old influencer Charli D’Amelio with almost 50 million followers on TikTok who captured content for Prada during Milan Fashion Week. According to Kristin Maverick, Prada are smart to focus on partnering up with content creators before starting to create content themselves.
Ralph Lauren tied a hashtag challenge to a sporting event during the US Open. It’s interesting to see how Ralph Lauren’s TikTok hashtag #WinningRL has generated over 700 million views (their video and user-generated content added together) while a polished video from that campaign only had 8,000 views according to Vogue Business.
MAC Cosmetics launched its first TikTok campaign, a hashtag challenge called #YouOwnIt, pegged to September’s New York Fashion Week. The result was 1.5 billion views in six days, the highest amount to date for a TikTok campaign over a similar period. According to a Marketing Executive from MAC, they wanted the consumers to get off their couches and create with them.
For the time being, fashion brands on Tik Tok are more into partnering up with influencers to create content for them. Apparently, if your brand’s target age is between 13 and 30 years, you need a TikTok strategy. The trick is whether or not these views and content generate sales and how, but the difficulty of measuring this also has to do with TikTok being such a young and fresh platform.
All and all, I don't think that every brand that is on Instagram should automatically create a TikTok profile as well. Yes, digital strategy is becoming increasingly important, which is something I wrote about in a previous post. That being said, TikTok is quite a new phenomenon and you maybe shouldn't rush to create those "sassy classy nasty" dance videos just because everyone else is doing it. However, digital marketers should definitely keep their finger on the pulse of TikTok and keep this platform in mind, especially if they are looking to appeal to Gen Z customers.