ghd spa
The challenge
To challenge public perception about the brand and support ambitious sales targets for its limited edition Midnight product, ghd needed to move from solely product-focused PR activities and provide rich content for feature pages of the fashion and beauty media, online and offline.
The solution
Shine created the ghd spa: a unique, stand out experience for top tier press; something extraordinary to strike a chord with the beauty media, ensuring the brand retained its front of mind status for these key influencers, whilst directly translating into stand out press coverage.
Morocco was chosen as the location for the ghd spa, as it provided aesthetically interesting and varied landscapes for production locations and would be engaging for the media. Shine turned a stunning villa into the spa, creating a Styling Room for the creative team to brief and educate the press, the Catwalk Collection, which was a pop-up photography studio, and the Runway – a series of outdoor staged locations for creating stunning, on-trend photography.
Shine worked closely with the attendees ahead of the trip in order to put together packages of exclusive content for each. This included sourcing stunning locations, arranging for models to attend, working out the logistical requirements necessary to shoot, and liaising between the media titles and the ghd hair creative team. In turn Shine negotiated space and message penetration in writing with the titles ensuring maximum impact features.
ghd’s Facebook page became an online hub for the creative output from the spa, connecting over 500,000 consumers to the latest looks and hair trends that ghd’s creative team were producing.
The results
A series of standout features were delivered, including four pages in Look, two pages in Heat, a double page spread in Metro, four pages in You, a significant feature in Beautyandthedirt, and eight pages in SuperSuper. Following the activity, 96% of beauty editors had heard of ghd Midnight and 73% thought of ghd as ‘fashion forward’.
The campaign was directly responsible for driving a significant increase in year-on-year sales during the critical pre-Christmas period.
What the client thought...
“The success of the Midnight collection was achieved in large part to the coverage that was achieved as a result of Shine’s first ghd spa. The activity delivered stand out coverage and ensured that the activity, a first for the business, delivered beyond expectations.”
Liz Byrne, ghd