Garnier leans into internet humor, fandom, and Cher to reach Gen Zennials
Garnier has spent the past year and a half rebuilding its mass beauty marketing around internet humor, fandoms, reality TV, dating culture, and culturally specific storytelling, Glossy reported. The brand is aiming at Gen Zennials rather than relying only on traditional product-led beauty campaigns. Philip Tabak, Garnier's AVP of U.S. marketing and business operations, said the team wanted to lean into social conversation rather than over-engineer the creative. One campaign used a mock hacked-account setup built around a loose moose joke in New York City. The broader strategy puts creators and pop-culture timing closer to the center of the brand's media plan.
THE BREAKDOWN
Beauty brands are paying for cultural fluency, not only polished product demos. Creators who can credibly write the joke, seed the format, and sell the product should charge a creative strategy fee on top of usage. Agents should define whether the brand can reuse a creator's concept across paid social, retail media, and in-store assets. Brand managers should move faster on trend approvals or accept that creator-led humor will arrive late. The best Garnier-style campaigns need contract language that protects spontaneity without giving the brand unlimited reuse of the creator's voice.
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