Customers were opening their Clear Essence lotions to find clumped, oxidised, degraded product  and they were telling everyone. A quality failure had been dismantling decades of brand equity, and consumers in the Nigerian market had simply stopped trusting it. The damage was compounded by a wider crisis in the market, Nigeria's anti-bleaching public health campaigns had singled out hydroquinone, a key ingredient in Clear Essence's formulations, as dangerous. Clear Essence operates within the globally accepted safety threshold, but that detail never made it into the public conversation. 

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By the time we came on board, Clear Essence faced two distinct audiences with two entirely different relationships to the brand. Gen Z consumers barely knew it existed and older consumers who had lost their trust. For Gen Z, the task was an introduction: bringing their products into a generation's skincare conversation for the first time. We designed and executed a micro-influencer campaign on TikTok reaching creators in every part of the country from end to end. 

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For older consumers and wholesale distributors, the people who remembered the brand at its worst winning them back required more than a social media campaign. We executed in-store brand activations with sampling at retail level, putting the reformulated product directly into the hands of sceptical consumers. In the informal market, we took a tailored sales strategy and trade activation directly to wholesale distributors.

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The results were over 2 million views across campaign content, a shift in consumer sentiment, and up to 92% year-on-year increase in sales of the featured SKUs.