Destination Beauty: Best Marketing Campaign Award

What does a Frontier Award winning marketing campaign looks like? We call tell you, as the winner of the 2019 edition was on the home team! The UK Retail Marketing Team, in partnership with London Heathrow Airport, were again this year´s winner of the Best Collaboration of the Year. These awards, known as the “Oscars” of the duty free and travel retail industries, celebrate the very best of innovation and creativity within the travel retail sector. And yes, this year we were amongst the winners. If you want to know all the details… keep reading!

Destination Beauty

That was the very appropriate title of a campaign that spanned for five weeks and consisted of an extended beauty event encompassing London Fashion Week and Chinese Golden Week. The event highlighted five exclusive destination themed make up looks created by five leading global beauty houses specifically for this campaign.

With this as the basic concept, World Duty Free UK and the London Heathrow teams worked closely together to maximise the campaign across all possible touch points. Heightened beauty service offerings, delivery of experiential activation for passengers to interact with, special promotions with the long established Heathrow Rewards loyalty program – featuring double points on beauty spend - as well as providing the opportunity for passengers to get hold of an exclusive campaign “gift with purchase” when meeting the qualifying spend – constituted the key elements of the campaign.

Campaign elements

5 looks from 5 brands inspired by 5 destinations.

With the help of the Global Beauty Team, we identified and contacted five Global Beauty Houses that were represented across all 4 terminals at Heathrow and asked them to create and own a specific Destination Beauty style. All five looks were created by the brands at an exclusive photoshoot for the Heathrow Select Magazine Destination Beauty edition which showcased the five styles inclusive of skincare, makeup and paired fragrance products as recommended by the brands, which were available for customers to buy both in our airport stores and on Reserve & Collect and Heathrow Boutique shopping sites.

Generic Beauty Point of Sale Takeover

As part of the activation, generic beauty “Point of Sale” space was taken over in our World Duty Free stores in all four Heathrow terminals, including our main, transfer and arrival shops.

Communication Landside

Communication also took place outside our stores with the airport promoting the campaign via advertising content on the digital screens across the airport - both landside and airside - as well as on screens situated at the Information Desks.

Beauty Services Focus

The Heathrow “Services Brochure” was redesigned to help drive footfall and interest amongst passing customers. With up-to-date details of beauty services offered by all brands across all four terminals, this brochure content was communicated on In Store digital screens, online and through the Heathrow Select Magazine

In Store Activation

Along with a strong line-up of brands set to take centre stage throughout Heathrow in September, the Experiential Marketing Team developed a multi-site activation campaign, led via the Terminal 5 liquor space, to try and drive people into store through with the offer of experiential beauty activities from brands including GHD, YSL and Estée Lauder. GHD conducted hair styling for passengers and YSL promoted both their new Libre fragrance and The Slim lipstick range complete with demos and colour pairing.

Heathrow Select Magazine Destination Beauty Edition… and much more!

Heathrow dedicated their entire Autumn Select Magazine Edition to Destination Beauty shooting the models made up with the five looks, alongside shots of the in-store product displays. They also highlighted several brands’ beauty service menus as well as the gift with purchase that was available and a £10 off £150 voucher offer.

There was much more activity that we cannot cover in this one article, but it included activations on the World Duty Free UK Reserve & Collect website and Heathrow Boutique website, Social Media support with key influencers and specific Chinese social media. All in all, this is the perfect case study of a multi faceted 360⁰ marketing campaign.

Behind the scenes

As you can imagine, a campaign of such dimension cannot be attributed to an individual, but rather to an extraordinary team of professionals. Nicole Watkins, UK Marketing Manager, commented on the activation: “Never before has World Duty Free UK worked on a beauty specific campaign of such scale with any other airport partner. After seeing heavy competition in the market, we felt that there was strong opportunity to deliver a joint campaign with one of our closest airport partners to drive category sales and ATV among our top destination passenger groups.”

“After ongoing talks and deliberation around the campaign to agree on a key period during which we could both give it our full support, Destination Beauty was born. For the first time, World Duty Free and Heathrow Airport would collaborate to bring passengers an exclusive beauty event during the September 2019 key trading period.”

Congratulations to the UK and LHR teams for a WorldClass campaign!