June is Acne Awareness Month and Hero Cosmetics Celebrates With New Campaign
Hero Cosmetics, which is best known for its overnight acne patches, is rolling out a marketing campaign throughout June that focuses on how environmental factors and self-care affect acne.
Throughout June, which happens to be Acne Awareness Month, Hero is taking a three-pronged approach to delivering its message. It started with a wellness-themed gift with purchase (that included ingestible brand Liquid I.V. and essential oils company Way of Will) on HeroCosmetics.us on June 3, which extends to the end of the month, and a monthlong influencer campaign on its social and digital channels. Additionally, it hosted an educational event at WeWork’s Made By We coworking space on Tuesday in New York City. The focus of the campaign is to promote holistic acne care.
For Hero Cosmetics, the interest in wellness stems less from a bid to use wellness to directly sell products, but more as a way to build customer trust and loyalty. Currently, 30% of all Hero Cosmetics ecommerce sales come from repeat purchasers.
Building trust with beauty customers has become more important over time, as customers increasingly demand brand transparency and expect authenticity, according to the Fashion Institute of Technology. Legacy brands that sell acne products, like Proactive, St. Ives and Neutrogena have been criticized for having too harsh of products and opaque business practices, representing an opportunity to capture market share.
But using the wellness industry to fill a transparency gap is also a thorny issue. The wellness industry as a whole has been widely mocked and called out for surreptitious rebranding of age-old industries, like weight loss and fitness. With acne specifically, while environmental factors such as air pollution and stress can lead to breakouts, but the biggest contributor is still a genetic predisposition, said Genevieve Vielbig, a nurse at med spa Just Ageless in New York City.
“All acne is not created equal, and there is no magical cure for individuals with acne,” she said. “Acne is misunderstood by many, especially adult acne. It has been oversimplified by the wellness industry, and often acne is masking a much deeper issue of a hormonal imbalance or genetics.”