Customers were opening their Clear Essence lotions to find clumped, oxidised, degraded product, and they were telling everyone. A quality failure had been dismantling decades of brand equity, and consumers in the Nigerian market had simply stopped trusting it. The damage was compounded by a wider crisis in the market: Nigeria’s anti-bleaching public health campaigns had singled out hydroquinone, a key ingredient in Clear Essence’s formulations, as dangerous. Clear Essence operates within the globally accepted safety threshold, but that detail never made it into the public conversation.
By the time we came on board, Clear Essence faced two distinct audiences with two entirely different relationships to the brand: Gen Z consumers who barely knew it existed, and older consumers who had lost their trust in it. For Gen Z, the task was an introduction, bringing the products into a generation’s skincare conversation for the first time. We designed and executed a micro-influencer campaign on TikTok, reaching creators in every part of the country, from end to end.
For older consumers and wholesale distributors, the people who remembered the brand at its worst, winning them back took more than a social media campaign. We ran in-store brand activations with sampling at retail level, putting the reformulated product directly into the hands of sceptical consumers. In the informal market, we took a tailored sales strategy and trade activation directly to wholesale distributors.
The results were over 2 million views across campaign content, a shift in consumer sentiment, and up to a 65% year-on-year increase in sales of the featured SKUs.
