This past summer, as a social media intern at Fragrance.com, I helped develop a Back-to-School marketing campaign to reposition fragrance as an essential (not overlooked) part of the college shopping list. Our insight was straightforward: students embrace a "new semester, new me" mindset every fall, but fragrance rarely makes it onto their back-to-school radar the way clothes or dorm decor does. So instead of competing head-on with big beauty retailers like Sephora and Ulta, we leaned into what made Fragrance.com different: designer beauty at a price college students could actually afford. The strategy centered on "Luxury Beauty Within Your Reach" — meeting students where they already spend their time and trust their peers most.
The campaign came to life across four deliverables: a "Rush Ready Beauty Bar" activation built for sorority and fraternity recruitment week, a nano-creator gifting program targeting 15 student influencers across U.S. campuses, two organic social videos ("What's in My Bag" and an in-store shopping vlog), and a creator video script designed to guide authentic, on-brand storytelling. Each piece used a different format, but they all reinforced the same core idea: luxury fragrance doesn't have to mean luxury prices, and discovering your signature scent can be part of the everyday college experience, not a separate purchase.
This project showed me how to build a campaign that scales across very different channels, from a physical tabletop activation to organic UGC, while keeping the strategy, tone, and brand promise consistent throughout.
