Earlier this year, SK-II (one of the few beauty brands that P&G decided not to sell this summer) announced a new brand philosophy: #ChangeDestiny. The big idea is that women should take their destiny in their hands, to position SK-II as a brand that allows women to do more and “to inspire women to change their own destiny, regardless of the little “dictators” in their life.” The campaign was launched with a film featuring Misa Kuranaga – the first Asian to become Boston Ballet’s principle dancer – and showed how her life story defied the odds to achieve professional success. To bring the brand platform to life online and make it more relevant to young consumers, SK-II also turned to crowdsourcing.

The campaign is based on the insight that, according to a study conducted by the brand, using SK-II products can “beat” skin’s risks posed by DNA, allowing women to “go beyond the skin women have been born with.” This insight inspired the core idea for #ChangeDestiny – which is about challenging the belief that destiny is set at birth, and about celebrating women who have gone beyond limitations to achieve success. Beyond that, how do you, as a marketer, take this campaign further?

The campaign is about challenging the belief that destiny is set at birth, and about celebrating women who have gone beyond.

To find fresh ways to bring its #ChangeDestiny platform to life, SK-II decided to ask young consumers directly through crowdsourcing. In a first project on eYeka, SK-II asked eYeka’s community to tell stories about what women should do to change their destinies, convincing them to plan for the future by using SK-II beauty products. The prestige skincare brand wanted to produce engaging, high-quality content that would connect with consumers and convince women to use SK-II now, as an investment for the future, instead of later.

SK-II wanted to produce engaging content to convince women to use its products as an investment for the future.

As the brand needed the freshness of creative crowdsourcing while keeping a strong element of brand control, they needed to provide fewer pieces of content that would be closely on-brand and give SK-II the possibility to review them during the production cycle. To enable the creative power of crowdsourcing while getting only high-quality submissions, eYeka briefed only a selection of eYeka’s best filmmakers, asking them to tell stories about what women should do to change their destinies (convincing them to plan for the future by using SK-II beauty products).

Here’s one example submission from Ukraine:

The approved synopses – like this one above – were validated by the SK-II brand and creators received grants (money!) to help them go ahead with production. Watch some of the winning videos below, including the Ukrainian one, called “Future Me” (first in the list).

On the photo on the right, you can see the team that worked in the video: The director, Pavel (a.k.a. Pasha or Oblikovsky on eYeka), sits on the top left, and the two actors are on the middle of the sofa.

This “Future Me” video was the most shareable video of SK-II’s campaign in Asia, playing on a key insight of young Asian consumers (uncertainty about the future), but it also became a reference when it comes to user-generated content in the entire category. Here is how SK-II used it on it’s Singaporean website, for example. Building on that success, SK-II used eYeka’s community for a number of additional projects for strategic ideation and packaging design purposes.

Building on that success, SK-II used crowdsourcing for a number of projects for strategic ideation and design purposes.

A total of 13 projects (some of which are listed on eYeka) have engaged hundreds of creative individuals who have submitted over 5,500 ideas in the form of retail concepts, packaging designs, digital experience ideas or high-quality videos, all reflecting today’s consumers’ expectations of what a prestige skin care brand should offer.

Learn more about how P&G used crowdsourcing to build the SK-II brand with consumers, and watch eYeka’s case study video here:

Disclaimer: As Marketing Manager at eYeka, and having worked on producing and sharing this video, I am biased in reporting about this story 🙂 But everything is accurate, and if you have questions feel free to ask!