.jpg)
Eggs, Rhode’s lemontini summer, Sabrina Carpenter’s Prada banana lip balm: if the buzzy digital marketing campaigns of the last year tell us anything, it’s that when the slightly obscure lands in the hands of the internet, it can make a brand moment. As beauty competition heightens, successful marketing strategies will be those that prove a product’s worth — and claim a space in consumers’ baskets.
For 2025, shifting influence, cultural tie-ups and purpose-built campaigns can help brands immerse themselves in the digital zeitgeist. But is it always good to chase hype? And what might it take to sustain cultural cachet?
In this chapter, we examine the digital marketing arena, reviewing brand performance across Western social media (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube) and Chinese social media platforms (WeChat, Weibo, Xiaohongshu and Douyin), as well as website traffic from brand sites and Google search volume. Engagement refers to the number of shares, likes and comments generated by a post — in other words, how social media users are actively interacting with content.
Digital marketing’s 2025 class
Charlotte Tilbury takes the top spot in the digital marketing pillar in this year’s Beauty Index, after ranking second in 2024 — taking the top spot from Cerave, who has dropped to sixth place. Fenty Beauty rises three spots to second place, up from fifth place last year, while Elf Beauty continues to ascend the rankings to take third spot on the back of its Rhode acquisition. La Roche-Posay and Nars Cosmetics round out the top five — La Roche-Posay dropping from third to fourth position, while Nars made its way back onto the leaderboard after falling to seventh spot in 2024.
Notably, no brand within the top five has ranked in the same position over the last three years. Compared to fashion, beauty shoppers are less brand loyal, driven by individual products, and, in some cases, a brand’s savvy marketing moves. When it comes to digital marketing, it’s the entertainment factor — if not the quality — of content that steers beauty brand sales.
.png)
Last year’s digital marketing leader, Cerave, slipped five places in 2025 to sixth position, even following a string of tongue-in-cheek, celebrity campaigns, including the satirical ‘Head of Cerave’ campaign in February, comprising docu-style ads featuring Charli D’Amelio, NBA player Anthony Davis and WNBA’s Paige Bueckers. Also spotlighting the brand’s haircare line, Cerave partnered with Sarah Sherman and Bowen Yang from Saturday Night Live (SNL), where the two posed as members of fictional heavy metal band ‘Naumôre Dandruf’. Despite following a similar format to its successful 2024 Super Bowl campaign featuring Michael Cera, Cerave fell short in capturing the zeitgeist in the same way, speaking to the ongoing marketing challenges beauty brands now face in keeping consumers engaged. Across all social platforms, engagements with Cerave’s top-performing post of 2025 — a TikTok featuring Davis at a faux press conference during which he’s appointed Head of Cerave — shrunk to just 11 per cent of those generated by the brand’s most successful 2024 post, which acted as a teaser to the Cera Super Bowl campaign.
Instagram content
Digital leadership in the beauty space is fragmented, with brands dominating across different platforms. Our research approach, which combines the impact of followers, engagement and video views among other metrics, sees Rare Beauty leading on Instagram, with the account’s content featuring celebrity founder Selena Gomez and a strong brand aesthetic. Huda Beauty leads TikTok, with Huda Kattan’s founder-led content bridging the gap between beauty education and viral trends; and La Mer leads on all Chinese social media platforms tracked but Weibo.
Despite not leading on any one platform, Charlotte Tilbury boasts a well-rounded social strategy, scoring among the top seven brands across all but two social platforms — Facebook and Xiaohongshu. While the brand’s creative campaigns centred on ambassadors from Amelia Dimoldenberg and MJ Rodriguez to celebrities including Kate Moss, Charlotte Tilbury has captured consumers’ attention on social media by tapping into the radical honesty narrative. Founder Tilbury called out dupes of her Hollywood Flawless Filter foundation in a viral, guerrilla-style clip. Born out of the dupe fightback, her ‘Legendary for a Reason’ campaign, emphasising the brand’s unique formulations and appeal, has so far generated 94,000 views on YouTube with the brand having an overall media impact value of $1.3 million (MIV), according to data analytics firm Launchmetrics. (MIV is the monetary value of posts, article mentions and social media interactions.)
Community, culture and communication
As evolving consumer desires meet rising shopper savvy, brand campaigns historically fronted by big-name ambassadors (celebrities and influencers, alike) are struggling with pay-off in a market plagued by eroded trust. The influencer-led model for building engagement and generating guaranteed sales faces headwinds, as consumers become increasingly wary of the cash generated by big-figure endorsements and, therefore, become less trusting of these stamps of approval.
Beauty discovery via influencer engagement now stands at 22 per cent, a slight decline from the previous two years. Instead, consumers are increasingly turning to people they know — and trust — for recommendations. This method of discovery is now far outsizing the influencer model at 36 per cent. Amid the constant search for authenticity, brands prioritising community-led content and two-way communication loops — responding to feedback and encouraging user-generated content (UGC) — are likely to stand the test of time.
Huda Beauty breeds this sense of community by sharing UGC from influencers and micro-influencers across its social platforms. While Huda Beauty’s overall MIV is the second highest of all index brands at $998.6 million, according to Launchmetrics’s propriety scoring of a brand’s MIV across multiple channels including print and social, it holds the title for the best-performing social post. The TikTok post, top in terms of engagement, features a range of consumers — from creators with 18.7 million followers to those with fewer than 2,000 — applying the brand’s Easy Blur Primer, and opens with the teasing line: “Is Huda Beauty lying?” It furthers the common thread that runs through much of Huda Beauty’s content: the high performability of its products. By having both full-time and micro-influencers play into the idea that the product is so good, it could be a filter, Huda Beauty can authentically drive relatability and trust.
TikTok content
.png)
Aside from UGC, employee-generated content (EGC) could offer brands a silver bullet. As young consumers show increased interest in the inner workings of the brands they buy from, more beauty businesses are leaning in.
Feeding into the idea that employees now are the brand versus simply selling the brand, Kylie Cosmetics poked fun at its own history in a TikTok featuring the brand’s employees. The clip captures employees wearing the bright blue lip kits popularised by the brand in the mid 2010s. By injecting a dose of self-deprecating humour (which the internet can’t get enough of), Kylie Cosmetics shows consumers that it doesn’t take itself too seriously, while highlighting the longevity of the now 10-year-old brand. Rare Beauty, meanwhile, takes the founder-led content route. Social content regularly showcasing Gomez in the brand’s HQ, helps cement her role as an active founder rather than simply a celebrity figurehead.
This rise in relatable user and employee-generated content isn’t to say that celebrity ambassadors can’t work for brands. As Charlotte Tilbury rises in the digital marketing ranks, celebrity curation and longevity lay the groundwork for the brand’s successful collaborations. Charlotte Tilbury cultivates industry relationships into long-term ambassadors, utilising red carpet glam moments for an ongoing sense of authentic product use; Phoebe Dynevor, for example, has been a brand ambassador since 2021. Elsewhere, Merit’s approach to celebrity mixes those occupying the zeitgeist (like The White Lotus’s Aimee Lou Wood), with stars that hold long-term cultural clout (nostalgic millennials like Brenda Song), through a content style that fosters a sense of intimacy. Its face-to-camera video content showcasing Merit-led beauty routines mimics the UGC of creators to give a sense of everyday use from the celebrities featured.
In developing ambassador strategies, brands should look to strike the right balance with a multi-tiered approach — from celebrities to big-name creators, and micro-influencers to their own employees — to avoid oversaturation and influencer fatigue.
Digital saturation to IRL activation
As the digital space becomes further saturated, beauty brands once again turn to IRL experiences to drum up excitement from consumers. According to our data, 55 per cent of consumers do half or more of their beauty shopping in-store, a slight increase from 54 per cent last year. So how can brands leverage real-world experiences to enhance their digital presence?
For brands in growth mode, retail spaces and pop-ups offer opportunities for virality and community, creating excitement beyond those who attend in-person. Open for just four days in October 2024, Rhode’s London pop-up resulted in an outpouring of UGC. If the reported seven-hour-long queue wasn’t enough to highlight a cult-like level of devotion, the brand doubled down on its community feel, offering a free coffee and pastry to those in line.
Rhode’s ties to its celebrity founder Hailey Bieber helped it ascend the digital marketing ranking by 12 positions this year, but there are other ways for brands to generate such an impact. The shareability of these IRL spaces is also hinged on aesthetic design, exclusive consumer experiences and cultural tie-ups for greater reach.
.jpg)
Product launches can also provide the perfect grounds to create brand intrigue. Glossier launched its You Fleur fragrance in March 2025, alongside a two-day experience in Paris. Consumers were invited to have their fragrance bottles personally engraved, receive an AI-generated poem and enjoy the immersive experience of the store. Between product teasers, the pop-up and the official launch, the brand generated $3 million in MIV through the You Fleur fragrance alone. Despite this success, Glossier’s in-store experience scores below the Vogue Business Beauty Index average for 2025. To boost this perception, activations such as these can add a much-needed draw to physical retail space when used to supplement retail fundamentals such as product assortment and customer service.
Instagram content
Digital resonance can be furthered through cultural touchpoints. Tie-ups with major events such as festivals, sporting tournaments and trade fairs are central to boosting appeal in 2025. Music festivals in particular have been a huge part of beauty’s cultural calendar this year. For Sol de Janeiro, this was its Casa Cheirosa activation at Coachella, which established the brand as the festival’s first fragrance partner. A multi-sensory experience, the space put the brand’s Cheirosa Perfume Mist line front and centre, accompanied by buzzy installations such as scent portals inspired by Brazilian orelhões. For Schwarzkopf, their Primavera Sound pop-up in Barcelona brought bold hairstyles to festival-goers, while taking the cultural crossover one step further by enlisting headliner Troye Sivan for a pre-set makeover in the form of blonde highlights, shared by both the brand and artist across their social platforms.
Case study: The Ordinary finds its purpose
The Ordinary, who placed first in the Vogue Business Beauty Index in 2023 and 2024, saw a slip in its digital performance this edition. Previously holding sixth spot in the digital marketing ranking, the brand now falls to ninth place, due to declines in both total engagement and views across all social platforms tracked. The main cause of this decline seems to be the brand’s TikTok account, where lo-fi, meme-fied content is struggling to cut through as more brands adopt similar content strategies.
For the Vogue Business Beauty Index 2025, the brand’s best-performing TikTok post spotlights the brand’s mascot — a lifesize take on its Glycolic Acid Exfoliating Toner — as it recreates the “What does she have on me” trend, generating 574,000 engagements and 4.8 million views. In comparison, the brand’s top TikTok post of 2024, featuring an oversized cake version of one of its cult serums, generated 1.3 million engagements and 28.8 million views.
TikTok content
Despite these declines, one area proving effective for The Ordinary is how it communicates its purpose. When consumers were asked to rate brands based on their impact in standing for values they support and being a positive force for change, The Ordinary ranked in second and third position out of the 30 Index brands. Much of the conversation generated from the brand in the past year focuses on product value, specifically utilising its retail spaces to drive this. In March, the company filled the window display of its New York pop-up store with $10 million in fake dollar bills to illustrate the amount of money consumers can save when the cost of big-name ambassadors are not passed onto the shopper.
Earlier this year amid an already rising cost of living, egg supplies dwindled, hiking up the cost of eggs in the US. What generated was a range of complaints, alongside cynical memes depicting the situation. The Ordinary responded by selling eggs in two of its New York stores for $3.37. While some customers were disappointed in a vegan brand selling eggs, others were clearly amused. “Can you become our landlord too?” said one comment left on the brand’s egg-related Instagram post.
.png)
Q&A: Alison Bringé
Chief marketing officer | Launchmetrics
What do Launchmetrics see as one of the most impactful beauty campaigns from the last year and why did it resonate?
Beauty campaigns resonate best when they’re timely and wrapped into the cultural moment. Few did this better than R.e.m Beauty’s collaboration with Wicked last year. The film’s long-anticipated premiere captured millions of eyeballs globally, and Ariana Grande strategically wove her brand into every layer of it — from on-screen product placement to red carpet beauty moments and even a dedicated Wicked drop. Just between the trailer and the premiere, brand associations generated over $17 million in MIV. With Wicked: For Good on the horizon, R.e.m Beauty’s partnership has laid the groundwork for future plays — proving that when a brand taps into the right moment, it can build long-term relevance.
Five brands have been added to the index this edition: Sol de Janeiro, Beauty of Joseon, Byoma, Merit and Refy. Do any stand out to you for their social strategies?
With well-being at the forefront, it’s no surprise that these brands are capturing attention. Their authentic storytelling and product offerings hit exactly what today’s consumers crave: selfcare that delivers real value. What sets them apart is their ability to build passionate, engaged online communities of consumers actively seeking connection with brands. By listening to these needs, all five have not only sparked meaningful engagement, but have come to dominate beauty conversations on social media in the past year.
What do you think the future of online engagement looks like, and how can brands prepare?
In a market defined by consumer scepticism and constant change, brands can’t afford to chase surface-level engagement. Real impact comes from real connection. Launchmetrics data shows that 77 per cent of total campaign impact comes from third-party mentions — content beyond the brand or its ambassadors — proving that it’s not about how often you post, but how deeply you resonate.
The real question is: what’s more valuable — a like, or a consumer talking about your product because they were genuinely moved by a moment your brand created? To stay competitive, brands must shift from scheduled content to narrative-building, from one-off activations to entire ecosystems with flexible identities. The brands that will win are the ones that move fast, listen deeply and create moments that people actually care to talk about.
Key takeaways:
- Build longevity. As price sensitivity grows, authenticity, communication and cultural relevance are vital to remain top of mind.
- Layered approach to influence. Tapping into creators who transcend the traditional influence spectrum can offer unique content opportunities for brands.
- IRL wins. From pop-ups to culture-led activations, the brands succeeding are those moulding every physical moment into a shareable one.
