Vivvi & Bloom
Approach: Build a fandom to lead a launch for a brand that doesn’t exist yet.
Skills used: new brand building, 4Cs, brand architecture, community as brand, fandom and subculture strategy, target audience building, primary qualitative research, focus groups, creative brief writing, charity selection
In webs, people have strong one-to-one relationships with others who have similar or complimentary needs.
Personal relationships are key to this community dynamic.
Business challenge
Launch a new, digital-first baby brand designed for an underrepresented, and therefore highly skeptical, audience of Gen Z and Millennial Black, Hispanic, and Asian parents.
Research takeaway
Skeptical, Black, Indigenous, and caregivers of color preferred a parent-led community instead of a celebrity spokesperson because they consider other real-life parents more legitimate experts in parenting.
Insight
“I work with a lot less creative, more analytical clients, but you're bringing a lot of life to this community and process.”
-Research Vendor
While other agencies came to the table with microinfluencer strategies, we came to the table with a community and fandom-lead one.
The type of community we wanted to build was also best supported by one-to-one relationships, encouraging us not to just create relationships from consumers to the brand, but also to foster personal relationships from caregiver to caregiver within the group.
The strategy team considered the brand architecture a living, breathing document: the brand purpose, values, beliefs, and behaviors were added to or revised based on our interaction with the community and further research.
Strategic brand idea
Co-create a baby brand, before any products existed, with a community of real parents whose expertise is fundamental, yet rarely considered in the category.
Bringing the idea to life
We established the first true participation brand in the category through a real-time community platform, designing a continuous beta with caregivers.
And in a world with so many brands asking for feedback and soliciting for fans, our silver bullet was identifying the beliefs, tensions, and language we had in common with our audience and turning them into actual action that community members could rally around. The more of those that overlapped, the stronger the bond. It was a true win-win-win for the brand, the community, and the R&D department!
Results
Set the gold standard for digital community participation with “The Village,” holding 99% average engagement rate, 10% week-over-week purchase increase at Walmart, 60% engagement on TikTok assets, and 2x above the industry benchmark for IG Video View Rate, all within the first 6 months.
“Co-creating with communities isn’t just the way for Vivvi & Bloom–its the thing we should be doing for some of our other brands going forward too. These are the brands of the future.”
Work
We even cast members of the community and their children in our ads!
What I learned from this project
When strategy is given time to be done well the first time, you can build slides like this (and more) that stand the test of time (or at least launch).