When Soyoung Kang joined challenger personal care brand eos Products seven years ago, the brand was rebooting itself from a lip balm brand on the rise to a full portfolio skincare brand that was quickly becoming a household name.
In her role as chief marketing officer, she transformed the brand into a popular brand among Gen Z and bringing younger audiences into retail partner stores like Target.
“I feel really fortunate that for a career journey at eos that has spanned over seven years, I have never felt like I’m not learning,” says Kang, who was recently promoted to president of the brand. “We have been proactively and intentionally evolving and shifting the business. We’re always thinking about something new, seizing the opportunity to switch things and test and learn and try things out. It’s really been paying off in the growth in the business.”
A lot of this growth has been built on connecting deeply with its Gen Z audience, whether that is through making an ad with real Gen Zs and their Gen Alpha siblings, creating an activation in NYC with a larger-than-life experience of its Crème de Pistachio 24H Moisture Body Lotion or hosting an immersive fragrance-inspired creator trip with a curated group of eos “besties.”
“If you look at the evolution of creator marketing, it was a largely transactional relationship when it started,” explains Kang of the impetus behind the recent trip. “Our goal and mission is really to evolve beyond transactional and have a more meaningful relationship with our creators.”
Prior to joining eos, Kang held senior marketing positions at Victoria’s Secret and Bath & Body Works. Brand Innovators caught up with Kang from her office in New York to discuss how the brand is leaning into experiential marketing, how they are working with creators and retail partners. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Can you talk about why you are leaning into experiential with the activation and creator trip?
There was a lot of pent up demand during the pandemic and even post pandemic where maybe people weren’t as eager to be IRL at events. After a really long and continued journey of activating through digital and social, we got excited about amplifying our storytelling and connecting with audiences and communities live at events. This has really accelerated this year through events like Pistachio and other the creator trip, where we brought some of our most valued creator partners to New York so they could experience the behind-the-scenes product creation process.
These touch points – whether it’s at a consumer event like the Pistachio event or at a creator event like the trip – allow us to make deeper and more authentic connections with individuals that will leave a more lasting and rich impression of not just who we are as a brand but who we are as people, so that we’re not just some nameless and faceless company. That enables them to become our best advocates. It’s very complimentary to the work that we already do in social and digital.
How are you cultivating feedback by nurturing a relationship with creators?
They can be the voice of the super consumer in a way and bring us insights and feedback and reactions that we really value because they’re so representative of their audiences. If they react to a piece of creative in a positive way, we have a lot of confidence that their audiences are also going to react positively. We took the opportunity this past creator trip to do some blind product testing for products that are in the R&D phase, to share the way we bring stories to life and the way that we ideate all the way through to how it comes to market and to get their feedback and reactions. It really enabled us to get a better sense of the things that are sparking excitement with fans that we can actually bubble up and accelerate in our own marketing strategy and planning and messaging.
Can you talk about why you decided to bring siblings together in the harshest critics campaign?
One of the things that people love about our brand is that we bring really great fragrances to people at very accessible price points. Through social listening, we discovered people often love fragrance when they’re complimented. We wanted to lean into this idea of eos being the ambassador of compliments in your life. How do you prove that eos is top tier compliment worthy?
We conducted some research that showed that siblings are the least likely people in your inner circle to compliment you, which we thought was hilarious. We landed on this strategy that even your younger sibling is going to compliment you on it and they don’t compliment you on anything. We thought this was a perfect opportunity to introduce Gen Alpha into the mix. The work actually was unscripted. It was truly a testament to our fragrance being compliment-worthy in that the older siblings actually used our product and the younger siblings genuinely were complimenting how great they smelled. We highlighted just how great eos is at drawing compliments out from even your harshest critic.
Can you talk about how you are standing out in the crowded beauty category?
I’m heartened to see a number of brands that are embracing an authentic and inclusive way of storytelling and bringing things to beauty that may not have been present historically in conventional beauty marketing and storytelling. This idea that we are trying to build an inclusive community that is made up of basically everyone means that we really think about a democratized approach to this community we are building. The creator trip, for example, wasn’t about having the biggest influencers with the biggest following. It was really about who has authentically been a supporter of our brand from the beginning that we really consider them our besties.
These creators are not just creators or influencers. We literally list them as our besties. These are people who have varying degrees of followers. Audience size is not the metric that we’re looking at. It is ability to authentically represent themselves and our brand and their affinity for our brand. Our team put this strategy in place that’s very centered on community, but more specifically, authentic and real community. The quality was much more impactful and important than the quantity.
How are you working with retailers to drive sales?
We are carried across many points of distribution across food, drug and mass. Really since our inception, our partners have given us a lot of credit for driving younger consumers into stores, through very specific quantitative data. We are a brand that drives traffic and in particular a brand that drives young traffic, which is hard to get. Our social-first marketing and storytelling that leans on creator marketing are designed to resonate with a younger consumer.
When you think about the traditional funnel, that journey is pretty much flattened into a pancake.
This idea of learning about something and then literally getting into your car and driving to a store in order to buy the thing happens within minutes now. We see that quite a lot in the content that we track through our social listening. We have been able to harness a behavior with our consumers, that is a very strong drive to store behavior. We’ve gotten quite a lot of kudos from our retail partner executives who have said that as a brand we really know how to harness the power of fandom.
Can you talk about how your past roles at brands like Bath & Body Works and Victoria’s Secret have shaped your perspective in your current role?
What’s interesting about my past roles is that they weren’t in marketing, but I have worked at best-in-class brands like Victoria’s Secret, which when I was working there was the behemoth. They were like literally the biggest and only. I also spent almost 10 years on the product and merchandising side of the business at Bath & Body Works, and oversaw a period of unbelievable growth at the brand.
I spent time thinking about what the consumer needs, strategically how you storytell and create compelling stories that are going to cut through in the cluttered landscape at the time, which was mall-based retail. Now it’s the competitive landscape within our retail channels that’s very similar. The most important thing that I’ve taken away from that experience that I bring into my every day here is just thinking like a commercial leader and a business driver. Having had that training on the merchandising side has really enabled me to bring that business and growth driving mindset into the marketing work that we do.
