NIVEA: Celebrating diversity and reaching new customers with innovative engagement

Challenge

As a world-leading beauty brand, NIVEA helps people all over the world feel good in their own skin.

To promote their Nourishing Cocoa Body Lotion brand, Nivea wanted to create a campaign that empowered consumers in Nigeria and Kenya to celebrate their unique skin.

The idea was to encourage consumers to send a picture of themselves and receive a stylized version of the image with details of their own personal skin shade. Participants could then share these images on social media — exponentially increasing the reach of the #MyCocoaShade campaign.

As well as promoting the Cocoa Body Lotion, a secondary goal of the campaign was to build up a database of consumers that wanted to engage with the brand.

But first, the NIVEA team had to work out how they would engage as many consumers as possible.

Solution

For the Cocoa Shades campaign, WhatsApp was identified as the key communication channel for the #MyCocoaShade campaign due to its widespread use in Nigeria and Kenya, and its ability to send and receive images.

NIVEA needed an omnichannel technology provider with a unified communication platform that could handle both the automation and personalization of the WhatsApp messaging, while capturing relevant consumer data for market research and future communications.

Infobip, with its Africa-wide network and local knowledge of messaging campaign compliance regulations, was the obvious choice. We developed a solution that enabled automated, personalized conversations between a WhatsApp chatbot and participating consumers.

The campaign was powered by:

To achieve maximum engagement, NIVEA promoted the WhatsApp number on social media, posters, through influencers, and via QR codes displayed at store checkout areas.

A WhatsApp chatbot would also ask consumers for consent for NIVEA to use the images on its own media platforms. The marketing team then selected a few to be posted on social media and on out-of-home advertising, including giant digital billboards in busy city-center locations.

Result

The NIVEA team was anticipating fairly modest engagement — in the region of 100 photo submissions. However, within a short time of the campaign launching, more than 500 had been received. The combination of traditional marketing techniques (flyers and billboards) with the digital engagement enabled by Infobip technology was a recipe for success.

The overall campaign results in numbers were:

In addition to quantifiable results, the campaign’s positive message strengthened NIVEA’s brand reputation. Meanwhile, with the help of Infobip’s customer data platform, People CDP, NIVEA is now building a database of consumers who want to stay in touch with NIVEA and be kept informed of news and events.