- Clinique is teaming up with Crayola for the return of its Chubby Stick products to offer consumers a playful way to explore make-up palettes.
- The collaboration includes a range of new colors, which positions these sticks as a fun way to add color without needing expert knowledge in make-up artistry.
- To support the product launch, the cosmetics brand is running an experiential campaign across the UK and Ireland.
Estée Lauder Companies brand Clinique is on a mission to provide consumers with fun, colorful and easy-to-use cosmetics and the return of the Chubby Stick helps the company achieve that goal. The make-up sticks, which originally launched in 1997, are designed to inspire experimentation and playfulness.
“As a brand, we stand for delivering simple and efficacious routines for the consumers,” said Karen Ehrlich, vice president, general manager of skincare at The Estée Lauder Companies UK & Ireland. “We thought that now was the perfect moment to relaunch the Chubby line to do an update on the shade range, but also talk to consumers about the stick format that is really trending in the market right now.”
Clinique’s Chubby Stick is the antithesis of complicated make-up trends coming out of Hollywood that require a lot of artistry and technique to pull off. “Consumers just want to play with makeup, to feel their best, and they don’t want the pressure that comes with makeup,” explained Ehrlich. “The stick formats are the perfect answer to this trend that we see right now, because they’re mistake-proof, you don’t need a mirror, it’s very easy for everyone to use and to feel really good with the results.”
The products also lean into the adult coloring mindfulness trend, in which people turn to coloring to relax. This is how the collaboration with Crayola came about. And that’s when Crayola came into the table, because of course, of the colouring trend, the well-being, the playfulness. And also when we think about Crayola as a brand like Clinique, it’s a brand that consumers trust, it’s a brand that is in the market for decades, it’s also an iconic brand. And it’s interesting because both the young consumer is familiar with Crayola for when they were kids, the more mature consumer is used to Crayola.
When the company decided to relaunch the product line in the UK, they didn’t want to rely on traditional mediums to get the word out. “I really believe in experiential marketing, and I really believe in creating meaningful emotional connections, because I think that when we do that, consumers are really able to engage, experience your brand, and also develop a connection that is very different than just looking at an ad for three seconds,” said Ehrlich.
As consumers prefer to touch and feel cosmetics before purchase, the company knew that a physical experience would be key to amplifying the message so experiential became a key element of the campaign. “I can do advertising. I can buy on TikTok and get to how many million consumers, but when I do experiential for the right demographic, I’m not only inviting the consumers to go and have a meaningful experience, but we also design the experience to be very Instagrammable or TikTok-led,” Ehrlich added.
The four-month experiential campaign kicked off in London and will travel the country with a range of pop-up experiences including an event at the Manchester Trafford Centre and on in Edinburgh’s St. James’s Quarter.
“We created large format events, mid-tier events, small-tier events to allow this pop-up to travel and to create a lot of engagement with the different consumers in different places,” Ehrlich explained.
