Galderma announced yesterday a £1 million campaign in support of its Cetaphil brand in the UK. In addition to consumer-directed PR, the campaign will work directly with pharmacies to promote awareness and education as well as provide  consumer-oriented promotions in pharmacies to promote the cleansing and moisturizer brand. This campaign reflects a prolonged and successful strategy by Galderma in their promotion of the Cetaphil brand through consumers and community. Indeed, the heavy weight pharma company has leaned heavily on viral media, social networking and other direct to consumer forums in the promotion of the star brand. The crux of this approach is the “Cetaphil, Comfortable in My Skin” program which ran last summer. Using Brickfish, a social networking tool, Galderma asked women in North America to interactively participate by completing the sentence “I feel comfortable in my skin when…” Entries were judged and the winners were awarded a Kate Spade bag packed with Cetaphil products and sent to the Bahamas for a get-a-way. This tremendously successful program built on the brand’s modest, relateable  and reliable image and paralayed into a community forum for promotion. To be sure, promotional ”community building” and  interactivity are a cornerstones in Cetaphil’s marketing.  In 2006, for example, Galderma conducted an online survey on celebrity skin which determined- much to the support of the Cetaphil line- that moisturization is the hallmark of an enviable hollywood complexion. By appealing to contemporary cult of the celebrity, Cetaphil not only engaged the masses in accessible terms but used the same terms to determine their promotional messaging. Another example of Cetaphil’s community brand building is the company site itself. Precisely, www.cetaphil.com encourages visitors to join an online community as a forum for skincare. The Cetaphil Club solicits potential customers according to the social networking machinations (with which we are all now so familiar) to promote the brand as the natural solution to their sensitive skin issues and among peers. Another tremendously successful program, the Cetaphil Club strategy has won marketing awards and recognition for e-health leadership for its ability to support online dialogues in dermatology.

While Galderma’s success with the Cetaphil line among dermatologists has been hugely advantageous, in its marketing to consumers, part of its success in community forums and social networking has to do with the breadth of its demographic. More than half of women, afterall, consider themselves to have sensitive skin. So, by appealing to this aspect of skin care rather than a condition or skin type exclusively, Cetaphil benefits from a customer base that is broad enough to populate a social networking effort and similar enough in interests to constitute a “community.” As social networking becomes a more mainstream tool in big pharma and med aesthetics marketing, it will be interesting to see whether Cetaphil is unique in its mastering of community or merely the first.

Related posts:

1. Ontario Pharmacy Changes: Reform, Retail and Rebuttal
2. Merz Emerging
3. Allergan Found Negligent in the Botox Battle- but the War Rages On
4. Canadian Consolidation: Sanofi Aventis buys Canderm