Bloom

Senior Capstone Project, Parsons Strategic Design & Management (BBA)

Bloom is a platform which gives selected micro-influencers access to products, education, resources and campaigns, in exchange for content creation. Bloom serves as a tight-knit community for it's users to help each other learn and grow, while J&J gains a fleet of aspiring influencers who have an outsized impact on the purchasing behavior of their peers.

Background & Intent

The Bloom project was the result of collaborative work of Kyler Ross (‘18), Nathan Barot-Shaw (‘18), Liza Tulinova (‘18), and Daniel Evans (‘18)

The goal of this project was to explore and develop concepts for how Johnson & Johnson can better serve Generation Z, those born in 1995 or later,  through on-lines sales and the customization of personal care products and services for beauty, oral, vision and self-care.

Content & Culture

To better understand Gen Z, we implemented various research methods. Namely, desk research, in-person surveys and interviews, online surveys and ethnographic research in a form of a cultural probe kit. These informed our insights around Gen Z’s views and feelings of certain categories of products, brands, how they purchase those products, who purchases them for them, where they purchase them and how often they purchase them. We’ve also gained insight on brand attributes and marketing that Gen Z click most with. These methods have given a genuine and authentic look into their lives and habits as consumers, something that we could not have accessed through any piece of written information available to the public.

Gen Zs, despite their young age, have high standards for what they want from brands. They are more attune and aware of traditional marketing tactics and don’t connect with big corporations as easily as previous generations. They are more likely to buy from more socially conscious brands that they can connect to, on a deeper, more personal, level

Design Strategy

Bloom intends to create an engagement platform for micro (10k-25k followers) and nano (1k-10k followers) influencers to shop for heavily discounted and free products in exchange for brand advocacy on social media. Users would be invited to join the platform, which would consist of sections where users could learn about the products, shop for new products they want to try, and participate in challenges with other users. Alongside the launch of the platform would be a marketing and media campaign focused around engaging larger influencers and encouraging them to join the platform to mentor the micro and nano influencers who would be the heart of the platform. This initiative would be framed as supporting entrepreneurship among young people and creating a culture of collaboration and celebrating creativity.

The platform itself would be invite only. Users would need to meet certain criteria to be invited to join, like having social media followings in the micro and nano influencer ranges, as well as high engagement rates and evidence of personal connection with their followings. Additionally the users would be between the ages of 13-18. The users themselves would be sourced and vetted by an outside agency with expertise in casting and finding micro and nano influencers, such as Reelio, Socialyte, or D’Marie. Certain quotas would be imposed on the cadence of invitations sent out in order to maintain exclusivity of the platform.

Marketing and positioning around the platform would be focused on presenting it as an initiative encouraging entrepreneurship among promising young social media influencers. The initiative would also partner with several high profile personal care and beauty influencers who would be members of the platform, act as spokespeople for the initiative, mentor the users, and generally be active members of the community. The primary selling points used to spur acquisition of users would be that once invited to the platform users would be eligible to:

• Shop for and receive free and heavily discounted J&J products

• Early access to new products

• Heavily personalized gift boxes

• The chance to be picked for prizes and rewards ranging from trips and vacations to scholarships

• Preferential treatment from J&J brand marketing folks as they are casting influencers for paid brand collaborations.

• Access to a ever growing community of other micro and nano influencers, as well as the means to contact and be coached by high profile celebrity influencers

• Classes and workshops around creating content and personal branding

• Tools to analyze and improve user’s social media presences

• The ability to collaborate and meet up with other members of the initiative

Impact

The primary problem with most influencer marketing is that the endorsements are paid for, and therefore short lived, lacking integrity and personal connection. By engaging micro influencers through community, mentorship, and education programs, Johnson & Johnson will be able to unite a group of highly engaged Gen Z who will become genuine advocates of Johnson & Johnson brands among their peers, cultivating the long-term multi-faceted benefits.

In addition to forming genuine bonds with up-and-coming micro influencers, and by extension making direct inroads into the health and wellness community, J&J will get access to a built-in database of influencer talent. A core part of the platform is a campaigns and product ‘board’ where J&J marketing folks will be able to give the members of this community early access to all influencer campaigns ran by J&J brands. Since the members of the community will be pre-screened, highly engaged, and provided with the tools and community they need to make great content, J&J brands will save time and money on their influencer marketing, market research and product development.

Moreover, the content these rising stars will produce will be of higher quality, and show a more genuine love for the products they are promoting, than what J&J would get through traditional influencer partnerships or any other channel, by that matter.

Lastly, by hosting a program which will help to empower thousands of young entrepreneurs and creatives, Johnson & Johnson will be able to reap significant PR benefits from hosting the program.