Luxury Lingerie:
Cultivating Brand Advocacy
A user generated content marketing engine, designed into the unboxing.
Challenge
How can an independent brand compete with legacy brands for awareness and share of mind?
Insight
User generated content marketing at this scale doesn’t happen by accident. It is ‘designed in’ through original creative direction, campaigns with genuine narrative depth and garments that make the wearer feel worth photographing. When customers responded by sharing images of themselves wearing the brand’s designs, it revealed a community that had adopted it as an expression of courage and individuality. The strategic question became how to honour that instinct while keeping the authenticity that created it.
How do you turn your customers into your most powerful marketing asset?
We launched ‘Dare to be Different’, a user-generated brand campaign. This audience had the confidence, the aesthetic and in many cases the photographers to produce genuinely compelling imagery. We invited them to be the next ‘face’ of the brand by posting and tagging their images. We curated the best content, celebrated the community publicly, and built the campaign mechanic into the luxurious unboxing experience. The campaign generated over 200 high quality marketing assets and 20,000 Instagram followers with £0 media spend. Niki McMorrough led the user generated content marketing strategy, from creative direction through community curation.
Brand
Luxury Lingerie Brand
Industry
Ready-to-wear
Lingerie
Luxury Goods
Skills
Marketing Strategy
Brand Strategy
Strategic Partnerships
Influencer Marketing
Community Marketing
User-Generated Content
SEO
Led by
Niki McMorrough
Photographers choice
As the user generated content marketing campaign built momentum, so did the roster of image-makers. Veteran and fine art photographers whose work appears in titles like Vogue, GQ and Marie Claire shot ~20 photo stories across the UK, Europe, Russia and the US — many of which still feature in their portfolios today.
Trade power
Galvanising retailers was a campaign cornerstone. We gamified their involvement by celebrating the best mentions, resulting in additional content, earned social and column inches.
“Guess who visited the store today? The one and only Paul Smith. #madebyniki”
Community conversion
Our website, database and social media drew in new fans through authentic, engaging content. Regular email updates and Adroll retargeted existing acolytes, while a curated homepage social wall and product page review galleries increased conversion by 25%.
User generated content marketing results: 300+ posts, 20,000 followers, £0 paid media
300+
Community Posts
by incentivising authentic customer self-expression
20,000+
Social Followers
by facilitating peer-to-peer virality
~200
High Quality Image & Video Assets
by curation of user content
£0
Paid Media Spend
by leveraging organic amplification and strategic partnerships
Questions worth answering
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Every campaign starts with a brief: your brand, your audience, what you want UGC to do for you. We agree scope, then onboard. If you’ve already got a community quietly tagging you, that’s a good start. Let’s have a conversation.
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For high-ticket brands, influencer marketing works best when the influencer is a genuine customer. Where that isn’t possible, we look for evidence the influencer genuinely reaches and influences an HNW audience, on intent not volume. Every collaboration is a partnership, never a placement. If you’re weighing one up, let’s discuss it.
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Context decides. Reviews on product pages, customer galleries and social reposts are proven formats. In certain cases, user generated content becomes the campaign itself, as it did here, and as Apple did with ‘Shot on iPhone’ (which launched the same year and is still running). Let’s see what fits your brand.