Going green: Garnier unveils National Geographic CreativeWorks campaign

Unveiled on October 1, the multimedia campaign aimed to educate consumers on important sustainable beauty topics, including plastic and packaging, water usage and green sciences, via a series of online episodes and feature articles. Produced by CreativeWorks – The Walt Disney Company’s full-service branded content studio and creative agency – the content would be published on the National Geographic network, with Garnier’s first video and feature on green beauty packaging already live.

Through the educational campaign, Garnier wanted to encourage and empower 250 million people to live greener by 2025 – a new commitment within the brand’s broader green beauty goals​ that included eliminating all virgin plastic in its packaging and converting all industrial to carbon neutral.

Inspiring beauty consumers to live greener every day​

Adrien Koskas, global brand president of Garnier at L’Oréal, said the latest campaign was critical to Garnier’s long-term goal of onboarding as many consumers as possible to more sustainable ways of consuming beauty, and living.

“To realise the full power of green beauty, Garnier wants to encourage consumers to take green steps too,”​ Koskas said.

“Sustainability can be an intimidating topic and our aim is to make it truly accessible – we’ve done that with the products we create, from solid shampoo with fast rinse technology, cardboard integrated tubes and refillable products – but we want to go further. Through the work of National Geographic CreativeWorks, we aim to give our consumers access to top experts and their advice for living greener every day.”​

Koskas previously told CosmeticsDesign-Europe consumer education and engagement would be crucial to the success of circular beauty​ and that it would require disruptive innovation from brands worldwide. “There will not be any kind of circular anything if [consumers] don’t play ball with us,”​ he said at CosmeticsDesign’s global Circular Beauty webinar earlier this year, still available to watch on-demand here​.

Creative storytelling the future of green beauty?​

Nadine Heggie, VP of brand partnerships at National Geographic, said the CreativeWorks team was proud to work with Garnier and bring its green beauty commitment to life.

“Bringing the passion and storytelling talent of National Geographic’s explorers to help tell Garnier’s stories, while inviting people to understand their own impact on the world and imagine new possibilities, is what we do best at National Geographic CreativeWorks,”​ Heggie said.

And the Garnier-National Graphic CreativeWorks wasn’t the first sustainable storytelling partnership in beauty this year. In August this year, fellow international beauty major Natura &Co partnered with Dutch video streaming service WaterBear​ as a founding member, unveiling a dedicated content channel set to showcase its environmental and social ambitions and inspire citizens to take sustainable action.

Marcelo Behar, VP of sustainability and group affairs at Natura &Co, said it would launch its first eco-documentary on WaterBear later this year and use the platform to deliver important messages around the urgency of today’s climate crisis​ in an “efficient”​ and “sharp”​ way to “young citizens all over the globe”. ​Natura &Co would also use video content to tell stories of the people behind its products; highlighting how people and planet were intertwined and connected and spotlighting the importance of indigenous communities in guarding nature and its biodiversity.

Sam Sutaria, head of strategy at WaterBear, said storytelling was certainly the future of sustainable beauty communication​ and could be used to drive consumer engagement and understanding far better than traditional advertising and marketing techniques. “Trust of brands is at an all-time low; people are not necessarily responding as they usually do to the traditional advertising. That’s where we come to storytelling,” ​Sutaria said.

*Green Beauty ​is one of CosmeticsDesign-Europe's top five beauty trends to watch in 2021​.