Brands are leveraging the live-streaming platform Twitch to offer unique content that engages viewers. French beauty brand Klorane’s Twitch strategy was centered on an educational nature and gaming stream called “BotaniQuest.” It featured influencer and streamer Baghera Jones playing cowboy video game “Red Dead Redemption 2”, in a quest to find plants in the game. Klorane’s focus is products with natural ingredients, and it wanted to emphasize that in this partnership. Seventy-five percent of the audience watched the 3-hour livestream until the end.
Fifty-eight-year-old Klorane has focused on engaging younger audiences through Instagram Lives and TikTok for the last two years. The brand runs localized social media accounts — Klorane France, for example, has over 66,000 Instagram followers and 3,000 on TikTok. Klorane launched on TikTok in 2021. For 2023, the brand wanted a more direct way to connect with an audience. Klorane linked with influencer agency We Are Social to engage a younger audience through the game. As a dermo-cosmetics brand, Klorane’s core shopper base is age 40 and up.
“This is one of the first activations on Twitch from a dermo-cosmetics brand,” said Anaïs Paranthoen, digital marketing manager at Klorane. She said the company was sure to not just repeat its go-to strategies by featuring an influencer speaking about its products on a Twitch livestream. As of March 2023, Twitch has 180 million monthly active users.
“The ‘Red Dead Redemption 2’ livestream was the best place to talk about what Gen Z cares about: nature,” she said. “All the gameplay maps are so fabulous. The game’s creators made beautiful, realistic environments, and so there is this parallel between these environments and reality.” The livestream was promoted solely on Jones’s account to target gamers in her community.
The starting point for the campaign was the idea of “botany blindness,” in which people don’t recognize plants in a picture, said Chloé Larmurier, business director at We Are Social. “The idea was to create some desirability for the brand and renew the way Gen Z generation saw the brand, while also solving for botany blindness.”
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The success of the campaign came down to careful preparation and execution. The brand spent six months preparing for the campaign, including choosing the right influencer to talk about the game. Jones has an engaged audience and streams explorer-style content. Klorane also chose what plants to spotlight in the game, like mint, mirroring the ingredients in its products, like the mint used in its Detox Shampoo. Plus it prepared Q&As for the audience in chat. Jones fueled Twitter engagement using the hashtag #Botaniquest, where she asked the audience to post photos of plants in games to create a digital herbarium.
In the BotaniQuest, Jones (344,000 Twitch followers) talked about the plants as they appeared in the game. Botanist Alexandre Panel joined the stream, steering the conversation with Jones and the audience in comments, while commenting on the plants’ properties in the real world.
The livestream reached more than 39,000 unique Twitch viewers.
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“Our main KPI was to change gamers’ behavior with plants they could find in-game,” said Paranthoen. There were no sales goals, and no site links or branding were added to the stream.
On Twitter, the hashtag #Botaniquest is linked to hundreds of screen-grabbed flowers from the game, showing the interest of the gaming community. #Botany is also a popular hashtag on TikTok, with over 322 million views.
“Red Dead Redemption 2” was released in 2018, but it has remained a favorite of streamers due to its “open world” concept — gamers don’t have to take a linear path to complete the game and can explore the world as they please. Female communities of “RDR2” players have blown up on Discord, largely due to the horses and exploration components. Other popular “open game” worlds include shooter game “Grand Theft Auto” and medieval fantasy game “Elder Scrolls,” both released in 2015.
Partnerships with more violent games like “Grand Theft Auto” are still contentious for brands, especially those with larger female audiences because of links to sexism and misogyny. Polish fashion brand MISBHV was featured in Grand Theft Auto Online in 2020 among others, but many mainstream brands have avoided the franchise. what brands have partnered with grand theft auto? Open-world games like RDR2 that favor exploration in nature-filled virtual spaces tend to better resonate with women, and provide opportunity for fashion and beauty brands.
