Complete with her Barbie-pink dress and bag, tbh skincare’s co-founder Rachael Wilde stepped into the spotlight and donned some pink heels as she took to the streets of Sydney’s CBD on Friday to prank fans into thinking she was Australian actress Margot Robbie — and the result was a hot pink ‘marketing masterclass’.
Robbie was in Australia completing the Down Under leg of her Barbie promotional tour last week when Wilde dressed up as the star and excited fans with a potential celebrity sighting.
The TikTok of the stunt has gone viral with more than 1.4 million views as of Monday. A second TikTok of Wilde heading to see Robbie was also uploaded to the social media platform, with another crowd once again mistaking Wilde was Margot.
@tbhskincare Well that escalated quickly… #margotrobbie #sydney #barbie #prank
@tbhskincare 🚨Abort mission, abort mission🚨(sound on) #margotrobbie #margotrobbiesydney #barbie #prank #sydney
While an ever-growing list of brands are launching official Barbie collaborations to tie in with the much-anticipated movie release, including in Australia, there are other, less official ways, for brands to also get involved, says Wilde.
For Wilde, who is also the chief marketing officer of tbh skincare and the co-founder of York St Brands, embracing guerilla marketing is a way for smaller brands to make some noise.
“If you’re a smaller brand with a smaller budget for marketing, I think it is really important to consider how you can cut through the clutter in the digital space and compete with bigger brands that do have the money to get in front of millions of eyeballs,” she tells SmartCompany.
While the stunt itself didn’t have the tbh skincare brand front and centre, Wilde says that wasn’t necessarily the point.
“It gets the customer interacting with the brand, it’s eyeballs on our TikTok account, and it’s very high-level awareness that we can then re-market to at a later point in time,” she explains.
“I also see our Tik Tok account as a place where we can really communicate the brand voice and get across the personality of who we are as a company. We like to interact with customers the same way we would if we were a personal account. It’s less polished, more fun, and a bit more scrappy, but that is what our customers like and it’s what we see much higher engagement with.”
Wilde says the response was exactly what the team had hoped for after their weekly content brainstorming session, where the idea first surfaced.
“The Barbie event was one of the things raised [in the meeting] and considering it was taking place on Pitt St, about 200 metres from our offices, it made sense for us to leverage this in some way,” she says.
“We sat around a table and thought of fun ways we could piggyback off this event to generate engaging content for our audience and get the brand out there in some way. It took about half an hour to get to a final concept that we thought had legs to potentially go viral.
“The response has been exactly what we had hoped for – 1.4 million views on the original video on TikTok, followed by a collective 320,000 views on related videos we posted around the Barbie activation TikTok in just three days. The video also performed well across Instagram generating 92,600 views and close to 3,000 likes. I’ve also noticed people commenting saying they hadn’t heard of tbh skincare before, which means potential new customers for us.”
Wilde and Bridget Mitchell founded the skincare startup in September 2019 before launching it in March 2020, bringing with it a new patented treatment for acne.
Wilde says her advice for brands when it comes to thinking outside the box while creating content is to step into their customers’ shoes.
“Think about what you yourself would enjoy consuming content-wise on social media,” she says.
“I think a lot of the time, people always start with, ‘what’s the message that we need to get across as the brand’ rather than ‘what is a piece of content that our customers are going to engage with’,” she adds.
“I think when you start at the customer level you can then find creative ways to weave your brand message into this, rather than starting from the brand level and then trying to make it relevant to the customer. I think you really have to be in the trenches as well, consuming as much content as you can so you can spot an opportunity or be really quick to jump on trends.”
Tbh skincare has recently launched into major retailer Priceline and has a number of exciting launches on the way.
“There are quite a lot of new products in the works amongst other things that I will have to keep my lips sealed on for now!” she says.
