at home for personal haircare because
nothing in the market was giving them
the results they wanted,” Kalyani says.
Redken partnered with Flavorpill — an
online guide to local events in major
cities — and gave the campaign its own
Web address, urbanexperiment.com.
The Webisodes featured “urbanites”
who Flavorpill selected from castings
in the top metropolitan cities. The
“experiment” filmed the winners
experiencing activities outside their
urban environment. The stars from each
Webisode were given makeovers using
Urban Experiment products, which
were seamlessly integrated into each
Webisode. When it was first launched,
the Webisode got 25,000 views. “For a
niche brand, that’s not bad, that’s all
about them spreading the news virally,”
says Kalyani. “On the next launch, we
got 90,000 views. And the relaunch
a few weeks ago got a half a million
views. The Webisode also ended up
on the Ellen DeGeneres show, so viral
marketing is working.” And although
the Webisodes were completely separate
from urbanexperiment.com — and did
not contain a link or call out to the Web
site — it still had a spike in traffic during
each launch.
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“DR touches every aspect of our
communication plans, and it helps the
brand marketing reach its goal.” In
fact, Kalyani adds that 100 percent of
Redken’s print ads are also DR marketing pieces. So what are some of Redken’s
current DR campaigns?
In the professional realm, Redken annually hosts about 200,000 educational
events with products and lead artists (of
which there are 800). At these events,
the communications team gets product feedback, requests and future ideas
— most of all, they generate interest,
which leads to sales. Online, professionals can talk in a community space
among each other and with the team at
Redken at Redken.com’s professional site.
The Redken professional site also aims
to assist salon owners in their own DR
marketing. “We have advanced business tools on our professional site that
helps them build their E-mail marketing
capabilities,” says Kalyani. “They can
use our site to build a personal address
book, to send out pre-designed E-mails
and newsletters with their messages. We
even provide them with metrics on each
of the E-mails they send so that they can
gauge the level of interest.”
As far as traditional media channels go,
Redken still uses these outlets, but now
integrates them into larger DR campaigns.
“In print, our haircolor consumer advertising campaign prompts consumers with a
clear call to action to come to redkencolor.
com and arm them with more information
before going to the salon, all so they don’t
