The hunt by consumers for more cost-effective versions of premium products is nothing recent. However, the rise of TikTok has been marked by a surge in popularity around “dupes” — a term short for duplicates meant to denote a cheaper product alternative — tasking marketers with doubling down on their value pitch for fear of losing sales. For Olaplex, certainly one of TikTok’s most duped hair care brands, that meant asserting that the one brand worthy of being its dupe is Olaplex itself.
On Sept. 25, Olaplex with the assistance of over 100 earned and paid influencers launched an unboxing campaign around a recent fictitious product, Oladupé. The product, which was actually a repackaged bottle of the brand’s Olaplex No. 3, is supposed to tease how often Olaplex is duped on TikTok — with the hashtag #Olaplexdupe having over 30 million views alone — while also educating the app’s users in regards to the quality of its products. Just days after launching, the hashtag tied to the campaign, #Oladupe, had already gained over 5.5 million views.
“Imitation is the very best type of flattery, and I believe what we wanted to do is absolutely use this imitation, this discussion around dupes to really rejoice with the very fact which you can imitate us, but you possibly can’t replicate us,” said Olaplex CMO Charlotte Watson.
The influencers chosen for the trouble were meant to reach the worldwide hair care skilled and consumer communities, with individuals chosen including Lelani Green, Yesly Dimate, Shae Alexis and Audrey Boos, amongst others. To further cement the dupe concept, the brand also enlisted celebrity “duper” Taylor Madison, a creator who shares a strong resemblance to Kylie Jenner.
Olaplex is a premium hair care brand — with its No. 3 product ringing up at $30 — and is accessible each online and in stores like Sephora and Ulta. The independent brand in August announced its second quarter earnings, reporting that net sales were down 48%, led by a drop in sales for its skilled channel of 61%. In the corporate’s announcement across the earnings, CEO and president JuE Wong said that the brand is attempting to stabilize demand trends within the second half of the yr while increasing and optimizing its marketing investment.
Unveiled through an unboxing, creator videos promoting Oladupé revealed the product as the perfect alternative to the actual thing. Packaging looks nearly similar to Olaplex’s actual product, though its label as a substitute reads Oladupé No. 160 — a number chosen in a nod to the corporate’s 160 patents. Viewers were then directed to a microsite where the primary 160 visitors could secure a free bottle of Oladupé, actually a bottle of Olaplex No. 3, which was sent to them together with a proof of the stunt. Consumers had a big selection of responses, Watson said, and each free Oladupé bottle was claimed inside two hours.
“Obviously there have been all kinds of reactions, people type of bought into this dupe because there are such a lot of other dupes on the market,” Watson said. “We were seeing conversations happening around [it], and other people calling Olaplex out — it was great to see a lot of individuals also hopping into our defense and kind of saying, ‘Well, you possibly can’t dupe Olaplex.’”
A number of days following Oladupé’s debut, Olaplex revealed the reality behind the faux product through additional influencer content together with a video shared on each the brand’s Instagram and TikTok. The post notably featured a deepfake version of Wong, who asserted that no one can copy the brands’ “patents, ingredients or bond-building technology” before actually appearing as herself, a move meant to drive home the message of how easy it’s to get duped. The marketing stunt was strategized with agency Movers+Shakers and marks the primary collaboration between the 2 corporations.
The Oladupé campaign by end of day Wednesday, Oct. 4, had received 20.1 million impressions and 24 million views of the hashtag #Oladupe. The effort was strategized for the U.S and was also replicated and shared within the U.K., Canada, Australia and France markets, marking a milestone for the brand, according to Lisa Bobroff, vp of world communications and consumer engagement for Olaplex.
“We have the identical advocacy and love for the brand in all those territories, so it’s been great to see it as a coordinated global campaign as well, which I believe might be a first for us,” said Bobroff.
The great thing about social listening
Beyond directly addressing the recognition of Olaplex dupes, the corporate’s latest campaign also aligns nicely to its ethos as a socially native brand, Watson said, noting that Olaplex, founded in 2014, spent its earlier days on Facebook communicating with its stylist community via online forums as a way to help inform its strategy. Since then, much of that community has naturally navigated to TikTok, she added, where the brand currently has over 334 million followers.
“Our social landscape is kind of critical to the way in which that we go to market … We pride ourselves on really staying very close to the community, social listening, understanding what the community is engaging in and the varied insights and trends which can be happening on the various platforms,” Watson said.
A spotlight on social listening has also helped the brand tap into authentic conversations and organic trends that stretch beyond the #Oladupé campaign. For example, the brand in early 2022 noticed a trending hashtag on TikTok called #Olaplexbun, a label used for consumers to share their Olaplex-supported bun up-dos, and used it as inspiration for its own hashtag challenge and first official TikTok campaign, #Olaflex, a marketing move tasking consumers to share before-and-after content using Olaplex. Within 72 hours of the campaign’s launch, the hashtag reached over 3 billion views.
A spotlight on TikTok is becoming increasingly precious to Olaplex given the recognition of the platform for sharing hair content — the hashtag #hairtok has over 86 billion views alone. Further supporting that value is the app’s ability to help the brand shore up a stronger reference to a core younger user base whose spending power is growing, Watson said.
“It’s a demographic that’s increasingly vital for us, and I believe TikTok enables us to really speak to that audience in a way that resonates with them,” Watson said. “We know that the audience has a huge influence on beauty trends and on other generations and can be the buyer of the longer term for us.”
To proceed engaging with the community, Olaplex will stretch its Oladupé marketing campaign with additional influencer activations and content recapping the cheeky effort, making a point to plug into hype surrounding dupes while at the identical time making a case for all of the explanation why the brand is “undupable,” Watson said.
“What we’re doing is we’re identifying trends and conversations which can be organic on the platform that occur to have our brand, because we’ve got very high awareness on the platform in the middle of it, but then we’re able to construct upon these trends ourselves to, I assume, shape the narrative and rejoice,” Watson said. “And if we’re at the middle of this conversation, allow us to have a stronger voice within the conversation.”
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