Katrina Kaif’s Kay Beauty, which is around four years old now, seems to keep inclusivity and sustainability at the center of its marketing strategy. Social Samosa contours the Kay Beauty marketing strategy since its launch.
In 2019, actor and entrepreneur Katrina Kaif launched Kay Beauty to bring an inclusive makeup range to the country, with the message of being gentle on oneself, the brand's communication focusses on ‘#ItsKayToBeYou’. It also focuses on creating guilt-free makeup with an aim to go green with its sustainable approach.
The past four years has seen the brand creating a narrative on inclusivity beyond gender, age, color and identity by actively involving influencers to speak on its brand messaging of self-love.
Katrina too actively participates in the marketing initiatives, bringing her vision of Kay Beauty representing her to life.
Social Samosa takes a closer look at the makeup brand’s online communication strategy that offers a palette of relatability by featuring real people who have become the stars of their own life.
Digital campaigns and influencer outreach
The brand was first introduced to the masses via a video featuring known women across spectrums with Katrina and her celebrity friends’ Instagram handles acting as the vessel. Their massive following and fanbase eventually created enough curiosity amongst the audience.
Since the brand launched right before COVID-19, the focus remained on creating a positive space for people and Katrina got candid with fans through her online interactions. Alongside this, its COVID-19 initiatives have been pretty on-brand with its messaging that encouraged people to inculcate self-care into their lives.
The brand slowly started featuring people of different identities, gender and age to disrupt the stigma surrounding the perception of beauty. Throughout 2021 and 2022, Kay by Katrina gave shoutouts to cis-gender and queer men who use makeup and continued to feature male models to showcase its products.
Its focus on pride goes beyond the month-long timeframe with people from the LGBTQIA+ community getting featured actively. The brand has also partnered with different communities and featured indie singer Tribemama Marykali with other Keralites.
Kay has also teamed up with influencers and makeup artists like Kusha Kapila, Dolly Singh, Ankush Bahuguna, Samiksha Pednekar, Dr. Trinetra Haldar Gummaraju to create fun makeup tutorials and more.
Brand ‘Katrina’ and Content strategies
Kay Beauty has made its founder, Katrina, the face of the brand which regularly features her beauty guide on Nykaa’s official YouTube channel. She has also been featured in other channels like " target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">Vogue India to talk about her brand. Other than that, the actor, who has a social currency of 71.1 million followers on Instagram, is pretty active about new developments.
In these three years, the brand has also released new content-driven strategies and campaigns promoting their products.
On the first anniversary of the brand, it launched the content series ‘Kay Konversations’ featuring stories of Athlete Ayesha Billimoria, Vedika Agarwal of NGO Yein Udaan, Body Positivity Influencers Varshita Tharaney and Sakshi Sindhwani, Pilot Ritu Rathee Taneja and Actress Tripti Dimri.
The brand has kept up with the ‘Konversations’ since then to present all the inspiring stories that empower women. Taking a similar route in the following years, the brand released campaigns featuring many more authentic stories veering away from the traditional standards of beauty.
Actively posting about beauty tips for your skin tone and more, the brand has launched MasterKlass tutorials with famous makeup artist Daniel Bauer who also uses the products for various fashion weeks, the latest being the London Fashion Week.
Kay Beauty creates an aesthetic feed, with colour themes that bring out the skin tones, right in time for its new product launches and tends to use memes using pop culture references, giveaways and more to connect with Gen Z.
Initiatives and Offline stores
Starting with E-commerce and digital as its major approach, the brand’s focus slowly shifted to offline marketing – making Kay Beauty’s products more accessible. It expanded to 100+ general trade stores and leading modern trade stores in India. It delivers to 1600+ cities and was available in over 90 Nykaa stores pan India in 2022.
The brand also has a Corporate Social Responsibility arm called ‘Kare,’ which aims to give back to the community. Kay, in association with De’Haat Foundation, supports rural women’s livelihoods.
This is how Kay Beauty by Katrina has created a makeup brand that seemingly ‘Kares’ more about inclusivity and sustainability.
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