DISCUSSION
Will a web game drive sales for a ‘farm-to-face’ beauty brand?
Written by RetailWire Staff
Source: Farmacy Beauty Lab promotional video
Not every consumer is a serious video gamer, but plenty of people play casual games online to pass the time. Beauty brand Farmacy now plans to use an on-website video game to capture the attention of potential customers.
The “farm-to-face” brand intends to launch its “Farmacy Beauty Lab” game on its website by the end of June, according to Glossy. Website visitors will play the simple game and, after completing it, will be taken to a screen where they can personalize the label of a bottle of skin cream.
The game was intended to be an exclusive for a virtual press and influencer event in April, but the brand folded it into its broader public-facing web strategy. The company plans to update Farmacy Beauty Lab in the future to peg the game play to other products and ad campaigns. The Farmacy website averages 250,000 sessions per month with an average duration of two-and-a-half minutes. The company anticipates the game will increase dwell time.
A video from April depicting the game shows simulation-style game play, in which the player clicks on vials of ingredients moving along a conveyor belt to collect them and thereby create an order of the correct skin cream product. With each click of an on-screen ingredient vial, the customer sees a pop-up window of information about that ingredient.
[embed]https://vimeo.com/540849774[/embed]
While the move may be non-traditional for a beauty brand, Farmacy is of course not the first brand to try to leverage online gaming to promote engagement. For instance in 2017, the now defunct Jet.com launched a mobile quiz game with prizes attached. McDonald’s in Sweden once ran an in-restaurant mobile trivia game, and numerous other retailers as varied as Schlotzsky’s and TGI Friday’s U.K. have run promotions built around online games.
In the beauty space, there have been some recent examples of unconventional brand marketing which have paid off, including a series of collaborations between e.l.f. and Chipotle to bring collections of burrito-themed beauty products to market that quickly sold out.