How Coty’s Katy Perry social pop up drove 12 tweets per second
With over 73million Twitter fans singer Katy Perry is the most followed person in the world on the social media site, so when it came to launching her new fragrance Mad Potion, parent company Coty decided to harness her influential clout to pull off the world’s first social pop-up.
To build buzz before the launch, Coty worked with Cult LDN to post games, quizzes, and cryptic tweets to tease and excite Perry’s core group super fans called the Katy Cats.
The @KatyPerryPopUp opened on 22 July and saw all the usual elements of a physical retail store come to life online – with help from fans who acted as virtual shopkeepers to give advice on the smell of the fragrance. The shop used Twitter’s new buy now functionality to let Perry’s 73 million fans buy Mad Potion immediately before its bricks and mortar debut.
Speaking to The Drum Coty’s VP global marketing, celebrity brands and new business development Emily Bond, said the idea for the campaign was sparked by the singer's popularity on both Twitter and Facebook.
“Because she has so much power in the world of digital and social media it was a natural progression into reaching her consumers, offering them something special and also being able to give these fans an opportunity to get her new fragrance before it hit the stores, so it really had to do with Katy and the power she has on social media”.
Attention #KatyCats! How quickly can you break the #MadPotion message? pic.twitter.com/mM9bGkit1T
— Katy Perry Pop Up (@katyperrypopup) July 22, 2015
How big a #KatyCat are you...? Can you spot the correct bottle of @KatyPerry's #MadPotion? Snap & share now! pic.twitter.com/dfl4ke83rD — Katy Perry Pop Up (@katyperrypopup) July 22, 2015In the month leading up to the shop launch the hashtag #madpotion trended twice worldwide and during its trending period, over 12 tweets per second were shared using the label.
Bond said the results surpassed all expectations and “was not what we expected at all”. So far the campaign has received a total of 661 million impressions and reached over 74 million people. So what did the experience teach the beauty giant, which counts Marc Jacobs, Calvin Klein and Rimmel, among its portfolio?
“We’ve learned a lot,” said Bond. “We’ve learnt the power of Katy was stronger than we realised, we learned that her fans are interested in fragrance and what she is doing with fragrance and the biggest learning that we take away from it is that we could truly continue to do more of this in bigger and new ways for the next launch because it was so well received and we got really positive feedback on it from the fans. The other big takeaway is that we’ve got to keep innovating here”.
While Bond said that social pop-ups have the potential to be rolled out across its brand portfolio there are immediate plans yet, however further activity around Mad Potion is in the works with another pop up around Black Friday under consideration.