Building a creator strategy around the customer

I challenged a creator strategy that was increasingly shaped by what other beauty brands were doing, and rebuilt the approach around the brand's own audience — identifying who they were, what they cared about and what kind of creator content would actually feel relevant to them.

The challenge

The brand had scale, recognition and an established presence across social, but its creator strategy needed a reset.

Like many established beauty brands, there was a temptation to look sideways — watching competitors, replicating formats and following what appeared to be working elsewhere. But copying the category doesn't necessarily mean connecting with your own customer.

The opportunity was to step back from the content itself and understand the audience first: who they were, how they behaved on TikTok and Instagram, who they trusted and what would make creator content feel credible rather than simply “on trend”.

Building the creator strategy

We started with the audience rather than the platform.

The work looked at the customer the brand actually wanted to influence, then used that understanding to rethink the role creators should play across TikTok and Instagram.

That meant challenging assumptions around creator selection, content style and platform behaviour — and identifying where the brand could show up in a way that felt native to the audience rather than like another beauty brand trying to recreate the same formula.

The strategy moved towards a more deliberate creator ecosystem, with greater consideration given to audience relevance, creator credibility, cultural fit and the different roles content needs to play across the two platforms.

Making strategy scaleable

The goal wasn't to find a new version of what competitors were already doing. It was to identify what could make this brand more relevant to its own customer.

That meant creating clearer principles for creator selection and content, helping the team distinguish between content that simply looked good and content that could build trust, consideration and action.

It also created a stronger foundation for future creator activity — giving the brand a clearer point of view on who it should work with, what it should ask creators to create and why that content should matter to the audience.