De GRISOGONO Influencer Marketing Case Study

Challenge

Fawaz Gruosi, one of the most prolific designers of our time, established Swiss luxury jeweler De GRISOGONO in 1993 in Geneva. Credited as the man who initiated the black diamond craze, his brand has become a signature style innovating in the art of fashioning gold by means of volumes and dusky stones.

Every year, De GRISOGONO’s marketing budget is spent on three high level events: BaselWorld, the global B2B watch and jewelry trendsetting show; Fawaz Gruosi’s birthday celebrations in Sardinia and the Cannes Film Festival. As one of the world’s most prestigious events, the latter represents a huge budget but also the biggest key live opportunity for the brand.

De GRISOGONO, supported by Digital Strategy Consultant Henri d’Anterroches, wanted to optimize their investment and this unique opportunity to reach millions of people beyond the few who are actually able to attend the event.

What we proved in Cannes is that talking to the right people, focusing on a few and being relevant to them brings maximum visibility. Traackr is an amazing tool to push the right information to the right people at the right moment.
—Henri d’Anterroches Digital Strategy Consultant and MD at PlurisMedias

Solutions

Day by day Cannes Festival 2015 storytelling

De GRISOGONO aims to foster a universe where luxury is an art of living. For the Cannes festival, the brand worked with a team of 24 people onsite who were focused on producing live content to share the Cannes Festival 2015 story with clients and aficionados around the world. A total of 150 photos, 16 videos and 12 stories were shared through the brand’s channels. De GRISOGONO’s main activities were used to create content for the media and facilitate the creation of influencers’ own content:

• Bloggers and press were invited to the Martinez Hotel terrace to interview Fawaz Gruosi. Twenty-five influencers in cinema, gastronomy, art, and music were also interviewed who then shared this content on social channels, blogs and magazines to gain visibility and reach new highly targeted audiences.
• One of the festival’s most exclusive events, De GRISOGONO’s Divine in Cannes party at Eden Roc, was broadcast live on YouTube, live streamed on publication websites like German Vogue and Elle Italia and on 500 TV partners across the globe through a partnership with Associated Press. Clips were also shared on Instagram and Snapchat.

Establishing strong and close relationships with influencers

De GRISOGONO engages with key influencers all year round but live events provide unique opportunities to create impact and establish new relationships. For Cannes Festival 2015, the brand targeted a very small number of influencers from luxury, lifestyle and fashion and started building these relationships months before the event. The team listened to conversations online to get to know these influencers and offer them valuable and mutually beneficial opportunities – from VIP access, photos and interviews to producing content featuring them. Throughout the event, 49 key influencers were activated: Throughout the event, 49 key influencers were activated:

• 14 key influencers generated 19+M impressions for the brand;
• 25 influencers from related industries were interviewed and they shared that content;
• 10 influencers were invited to lunch to establish new relationships;
• 5 key influencers amounting to a 3M+ audience between them were invited to attend Divine in Cannes.

Solution

De GRISOGONO did what no other brand had done in Cannes - they focused on talking to a few influential people, instead of trying to talk to millions. By making themselves relevant and bringing value to these influencers, they hugely increased visibility. The team uses Traackr all year round to manage and engage with their influencers’ communities, which enabled them to optimize the onsite opportunities at Cannes and reach new highly targeted audiences:

• Identify and target the top key influencers in luxury, jewelry, lifestyle and fashion to participate in highly exclusive activities. Track conversations, mentions and interact in real time to amplify brand awareness.
• Track and listen to influencers’ content across social channels to create valuable and mutually beneficial opportunities.
• Establish and build relationships with influencer swell before the event; with unknown influencers De GRISOGONO started engaging six months ahead.
• Measure the social impact created by influencers’ online engagement during the event.

De GRISOGONO's strategy is to focus on content marketing and a few but valuable and strong relationships, experiences and conversations with key influencers to create and share an emotional bond with the brand and drive brand awareness with their audiences
—Gianluca Maina Global Marketing and Communications Director, De GRISOGONO

Results

By leveraging the live event to produce real time social content and engage with the right influencers, De GRISOGONO reached millions of people and optimized their Cannes Festival 2015 investment.

• Through organic and sponsored posts on Facebook, the brand gained over 21K fans and reached 6M+ users. 200K people interacted with a post and 300K clicks were tracked on De GRISOGONO’s posts.
• A total of 1.2K+ posts mentioning the brand were posted on Instagram versus 89 posts from the brand itself. The social activities brought 10K new followers for De GRISOGONO taking the total to 88.5K and generated 126K likes and interactions, highlighting the visual platform as a key social channel for luxury brands.
• An estimated 227K people were reached by @ deGRISOGONO and 3.8K new followers were obtained. The profile page received 12.5K visits and 922 @ DeGRISOGONO and 1,680 #deGRISOGONOinCANNES mentions were generated.
• 15K people viewed De GRISOGONO content on YouTube amounting to 950 hours of content viewed in one week and generating 1,644 comments.
• Finally, the brand website saw an increase in traffic of 450% in one week with 20K unique visitors, 100K page views and the product pages being viewed first.

Success

Good strategic planning for a good execution

The De GRISOGONO team started working on targeting the few but highly relevant influencers six months before the event giving them time to:

• Get to know them extremely well and understand their communities,
• Prepare conversational elements, and track, maintain and manage engagement,
• Propose valuable and mutually beneficial opportunities,
• Plan an ongoing stream of activities to suit the influencers’ communities.

Go for effectiveness, not numbers

Instead of focusing on influencers with the largest audience, the team focused on building relationships with niche influencers who would give them visibility to a highly relevant audience. They also targeted a small amount of influencers across different industries to reach new audience segments.

Not about the money but providing value

De GRISOGONO made it easy for influencers to associate with the brand by providing them valuable benefits. Except for a few influencers to whom they offered gifts in kind or accommodation, they did not compensate influencers’ engagement. Instead

they created value helping them to increase their audience and improve their authority with their existing community.