The 360° Go-to-Market Playbook: How We Launched ETC. Beauty Across Spain and France

In the hyper-saturated arena of modern beauty, the traditional go-to-market (GTM) playbook is broken. For years, the default strategy for emerging brands was simple: raise significant capital, pour thousands into top-of-funnel awareness advertising, blast thousands of unvetted PR packages, and hope for immediate mass adoption.

Today, that approach is a fast track to unsustainable Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) and brand obscurity. Modern consumers do not buy products from cold digital advertisements; they invest in cultural authority, authentic endorsement, and elevated world-building.

When the new beauty brand ETC. prepared to launch its debut product capsule into both the Spanish and French markets simultaneously, they faced an architectural challenge:

• Zero existing brand equity.

• No established local communities to sell to.

• A strict mandate for financial discipline—avoiding heavy, low-converting awareness ad spend.

At STUDIO UNA, we do not build generic grids or rely on brute-force advertising budgets. We engineer organic-first, omnichannel universes that earn attention before amplifying it.

Here is the strategic breakdown of how we executed a multi-market, 360° go-to-market strategy for ETC. Beauty—generating 3.9 million impressions, securing features in Vogue and Elle, and driving profitable, first-day revenue across two distinct European markets.

Part 1: The Core Strategy – Earning Credibility Before Buying Reach

When an unknown brand enters a competitive market, its greatest obstacle is not visibility—it is trust. The fastest path to establishing instant consumer trust without an enterprise-level budget is borrowed authority.

Instead of launching cold into two major European markets, we anchored the campaign through a clear strategic progression:

• 01 / The Brand Status: An unknown entrant facing zero established consumer trust.

• 02 / The Cultural Anchor: Securing a strategic partnership with Spanish actress Hiba Abouk.

• 03 / The Market Outcome: Unlocking borrowed trust through her authentic, dual-market relevance across both Spain and France.

Crucially, this was not a standard celebrity face-licensing deal. Hiba possesses an authentic, high-prestige presence across both territories—giving the campaign a natural narrative bridge across international borders.

However, a celebrity endorsement alone does not convert modern beauty buyers. We constructed the campaign architecture around a dual-engine philosophy:

1. The Context (The Story): Hiba provided the aspiration, lifestyle context, and cultural hook for the launch.

2. The Utility (The Product): The product capsule itself delivered the substance—focusing on versatile, high-performance formulas and natural ingredients.

3. The Organic-First Engine: Rather than relying on paid ad placements from day one, we led with an organic-first strategy. We leveraged high-fidelity content, earned editorial media, and strategic product seeding to generate genuine cultural momentum. Once the organic foundation proved that the narrative resonated, we deployed targeted paid media as an amplifier to capture active demand.

In short: Prove the story organically first, then fuel what is already converting.

Part 2: The Omnichannel Architecture – Execution Across 4 Pillars

A 360° strategy only succeeds when every touchpoint operates as an interconnected ecosystem. We structured ETC.’s cross-border launch across four synchronized pillars, hyper-localised for both Paris and Madrid:

Pillar 1: Hyper-Local Boutique PR (Madrid × Paris)

• Strategy: Native market fluency through local expertise.

• Execution: Press credibility cannot be translated via a single centralized agency. The media ecosystems, cultural nuances, and journalist networks in Paris and Madrid are vastly different. To ensure native fluency, we partnered with two separate, high-prestige boutique PR agencies—one based in Madrid and one in Paris—unlocking direct access to top-tier beauty editors and immediate media trust.

Pillar 2: Experiential World-Building (Intimate Launch Dinners)

• Strategy: High-retention physical destinations that foster genuine advocacy.

• Execution: Instead of hosting large, impersonal press events, we curated intimate, highly exclusive dinner activations in both Paris and Madrid. These gatherings were deliberately capped to foster direct, hands-on interaction with the product capsule. By cultivating an atmosphere of "if you know, you know" luxury, the events achieved two strategic goals: generating immediate, high-aesthetic social content from guests in real time and cultivating deeply invested brand advocates.

Pillar 3: Strategic KOL & Influencer Seeding

• Strategy: Unpaid, authentic discovery over transactional sponsorships.

• Execution: Paid influencer posts often read as inorganic advertisements. Conversely, gifted products that creators genuinely fall in love with drive organic discovery. We allocated 100 curated gift sets of ETC.’s new product capsule for organic seeding to top-tier Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) and micro-to-mid-tier creators across Spain and France, generating widespread, unpaid endorsement across both target feeds.

Pillar 4: Precision Performance Media

• Strategy: Targeted upper, mid, and lower-funnel acquisition to convert warm awareness.

• Execution: In an organic-first launch, paid media serves as the amplifier, not the engine. Because organic activity, press features, and creator seeding had already established market credibility, our paid ad spend worked significantly harder at a lower cost. We deployed targeted upper and mid-funnel campaigns to route traffic to the e-commerce store, paired with retargeting layers to convert warm awareness into immediate revenue.

Part 3: The Results – Reach, Credibility, and Conversion

Executing a synchronized, organic-first GTM strategy delivered strong performance metrics across the entire conversion funnel—from top-of-funnel reach to bottom-line e-commerce sales within the first 6 weeks of trading.

1. Media & Campaign Performance

• 3.9 Million Total Campaign Impressions

• 1.4 Million Unique Audience Reach

• €3.83 CPM (Cost Per Thousand)—an exceptionally efficient rate for a cold-start market entry

• 1.93% Click-Through Rate (CTR) across digital assets

2. Earned Media & Advocacy Metrics

• 711,000+ Organic Media Impressions generated via creator seeding

• €10,640 Estimated Earned Media Value (EMV) achieved entirely without direct paid placement fees

3. Tier-One Editorial Coverage

The localized PR strategy secured editorial features across premier fashion and lifestyle publications in both territories:

4. E-Commerce Impact (First 6 Weeks)

• 17,000 High-Intent Website Sessions

• €10,100 In Direct Revenue Generated

• 188 Completed Orders

• €53.70 Average Order Value (AOV)

For a brand with zero market footprint six weeks prior, this strategy delivered brand awareness, tier-one editorial credibility, and immediate sales velocity—all while protecting the brand's capital.

Part 4: Strategic Key Takeaways for Launching a Modern Brand

The success of ETC. Beauty’s dual-market debut offers critical takeaways for founders, brand directors, and marketers preparing to introduce new products or enter new territories:

1. Authentic Relevance Outweighs Follower Count

Selecting a strategic partner or ambassador requires looking past superficial follower counts. Hiba Abouk was selected because her cultural identity mapped onto both target geographic markets. Align with talent who naturally embody the lifestyle universe you are building.

2. Organic-First Is a Financial and Strategic Moat

Leading with earned media, high-retention creator seeding, and experiential activations builds genuine brand equity before committing heavy capital to paid channels. When you layer paid media on top of an already validated story, your Customer Acquisition Cost drops significantly.

3. Localise, Never Translate

Cross-border expansion fails when brands attempt to run international campaigns from a single central desk. Working with hyper-local teams on the ground in Paris and Madrid ensured that ETC. spoke the native cultural and media language of each city, unlocking top-tier editorial coverage in both regions.

4. Connect Utility to World-Building

A superior product without a compelling visual story will get lost in the feed. Equally, a brilliant narrative with a poor product formula leads to high churn. True brand velocity occurs at the exact intersection of product utility and aesthetic world-building.

The Studio Una Approach

At STUDIO UNA, we do not view marketing as a series of disconnected tactical tasks—a PR push here, an influencer gift box there. We build comprehensive, 360° digital universes where strategy, visual identity, PR, community activations, and performance media operate as a single system.

Whether you are launching an ambitious new product line, expanding into new international markets, or overhauling an established brand narrative, we engineer go-to-market strategies that capture attention, build cultural authority, and drive sustainable growth.

Ready to transform your brand narrative and build a scalable digital universe?

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