CASE STUDY
The Body Shop
The beauty industry is a highly competitive market yet The Body Shop has made a name for itself. Let’s explore how Brandwatch helps them find ways to stand out from the crowd.
The Body Shop. It’s a brand name that you probably associate with fresh smelling lotions and a passion for sustainability.
Starting in Brighton, England in 1976, the company began with founder Dame Anita Roddick and her belief in something revolutionary: that business could be a force for good.
Since then, The Body Shop has become a global brand dedicated to ethically sourced and natural ingredients from around the world.
We’re lucky enough to call it a Brandwatch client.
In this case study, we’ll explore how The Body Shop uses Brandwatch solutions, as well as how the team leverages digital consumer intelligence to improve decision making.
You’ll hear from The Body Shop’s Director of Customer Strategy and Analytics Jennifer Rice who has been working on The Body Shop’s insights team since 2015.
What challenges are The Body Shop trying to solve?
The Body Shop is a well-known, well-loved brand. So what challenges is it setting out to solve with social listening?
In the beauty industry, there is a lot of competition. Not just from other brands, but from the increase in influencers and celebrities starting their own entirely new lines.
The Body Shop team runs an annual tracker to get a better idea of where the brand stands in the market, but the cost of these trackers stopped the team from checking the pulse more frequently.
In its really competitive market, The Body Shop needs ongoing global tracking of the brand, competitors, and campaigns that wouldn’t break the bank.
That’s where social listening comes in.
The road to social listening
Knowing the challenges, The Body Shop started out small with social listening in 2016. The team looked at a short list of queries in English-speaking markets. In the beginning, these findings were just used within the insights team. But The Body Shop quickly saw the benefit of expansion and making earned mentions a key metric for brand success.
Fast forward to 2019 and The Body Shop came on board as a Brandwatch client. Since then, its insights team has scaled up.
“We found Brandwatch really valuable as an insights team. What really unlocked things for us was making earned mentions a key metric for brand success. If we know that brand buzz is one of our challenges then being able to measure whether people are talking about us is key.”
5 ways The Body Shop uses Brandwatch to achieve its goals
With Brandwatch by its side, The Body Shop has seen success in critical areas. Here are five different ways the insights team has used Brandwatch Consumer Research to its advantage.
1. Turning online chatter into campaign inspiration
You can only sell to consumers if you understand them. That’s why the internet changed the game for so many businesses. Social media, product reviews, online conversations – these are all platforms where you can grab data points about who your customers are and what they need.
“For us, there’s nothing like going into Brandwatch and looking into something like skincare, for example. We get to really hear what people are saying and in turn we get great ideas and insights for our campaigns.”
2. Monitoring and optimizing campaign and product performance
Have you ever wished you could get instant feedback on a new product launch? Are you longing for customer input that is honest and direct?
The internet is your best bet. Brandwatch helps The Body Shop monitor millions of conversations related to its products and campaigns. This is an invaluable source of feedback for product and marketing teams as they can explore what’s working, what isn’t and what needs to change.
“One feature we are beginning to use more and more is around campaign and product performance. We recently launched body butters, a big product for us. So we set up a dashboard so we can really understand the volume of conversations, topics, and what people are picking up on.”
3. Managing corporate reputation
Have you ever seen a company go viral for the wrong reasons? It’s not a pretty sight. The best offense is a good defense, and many global brands are constantly monitoring mentions and key phrases to keep abreast of online perceptions. At The Body Shop, the corporate reputation and global PR team uses Brandwatch Alerts to stay one step ahead of any major events unfolding online involving the brand.
“If there is someone who has a significant number of followers talking about our brand, or if there is a particular issue we are worried about that might come up in public conversations, alerts are sent to the team every morning to make sure we’re aware of what’s happening online.”
4. Spotting opportunities and trends
Brandwatch empowers teams to keep tabs on trends, volume of conversation, and sentiment. This means that when a trend or moment your brand might want to hop on online opens up, your team will be pinged so you can snap into action. Alerts and signals aren’t just for spotting crises – they can help brands identify opportunities too.
“Brandwatch enables us to pick up on issues very early on which helps in terms of risk management. But it also helps us hop on trends, if someone with a lot of followers organically posts about us, it means we can amplify that through our marketing and our social. It enables us to jump on those things quickly.”
5. Understanding trends in sustainability and activism for product development
The Body Shop prides itself on offering products that are ethically sourced and contain natural ingredients. In fact, sustainability is one of its core values.
Knowing this, Jennifer and her team were able to track conversations around the topic to better understand what people wanted to hear about. This kind of research continually helps The Body Shop shape its social media strategies and even larger campaigns.
“We found that everyone was talking about refills. It was us going back to our roots. And that was sort of a light-bulb moment in the organization. Really what it did was give us the confidence that refills are what we should be doing and helped us accelerate the program.”
Trial and error: Top tips on social listening from The Body Shop
So, what kind of advice does Jennifer have to share for anyone starting their social listening journey? Here are her five things to consider:
Start small: It may be tempting to roll out Brandwatch dashboards to every market on day one, but your team will need more time to become comfortable with a new tool. Start small and onboard at a comfortable pace.
Build the right team structure: Building queries and generating insights take time. If your team doesn’t have the capacity to take that on, make sure you get a Brandwatch project manager on the case.
Spend time on your briefs: Putting in the work in the first place means the rest of the game will be smooth(er) sailing. Make sure you have what you need before you jump in – it will save a lot of headaches down the line.
Filter out the noise: There’s always going to be a certain level of noise in your data. Whether that’s a different business with the same name or a common word in your company’s title, be mindful of these things. In the case of The Body Shop, the phrase can refer to the brand or to a garage, so some data cleaning is needed to collect relevant mentions from the rich social dataset.
Secure executive buy-in: Actively report on successes with social listening and, if possible, tie your data points to sales. Don’t wait for someone to come knocking on your door, make note of key statistics or results as you work and make sure your results get the visibility they deserve.