“The shadow pandemic of loneliness is growing into a health crisis beyond our imaginations,” says Julia Geissen, Marketing Director for NIVEA at Beiersdorf Canada, in her recent remarks to the press.
The brand, she says, “has always been a brand dedicated to making people feel good in your skin, by caring for skin and for people.”
And Geissen explains that “NIVEA appreciates the overwhelmingly positive health effects of human touch and is focused on facilitating togetherness once it's safe and allowable to do so. Our wellbeing hinges on restoring tangible human contact.”
So much of personal care and selfcare require human touch
Nivea commissioned a study to learn more about people’s perceptions and practices surrounding human touch and found that 90% of respondents believe that touch is “key to leading a happy and fulfilled life.”
And 75% have “[realized] how important physical touch is for their health,” during the pandemic. As a result, the brand is awareness, education, and marketing campaigns to inform consumers about the benefits of touch.
The idea isn’t novel; many beauty brands have been founded on the importance of touch. The blended essential oils and aromatherapy brand Bija Essence is one such brand.
The Bija Essence landing page invites consumer to “Take the time to experience the wonders of touch.” While further site copy explains the Bija Essence philosophy further saying, “We believe in the Power of Touch. Imagine, we can convey Gratitude, Love, Compassion, Respect with just a simple Touch without uttering a word. Touch is truly fundamental to human communication, bonding, and health.”
NIVEA’s plans to spread the word about benefits of human touch
To gather data on touch, NIVEA partnered with independent research institute mindline. The institute ran 2 survey, each involving over 11,000 people around the world.
“86% of respondents say that being more informed about the benefits of human touch would compel them to prioritize it more than they currently do.”
To this end, NIVEA is launching the Care For Human Touch campaign to spread the word. (Read more on the campaign in this recent drum.com article by Rebecca Stewart.)
NIVEA has committed to support ski-touch projects to benefit premature infants, visually impaired people, seniors living with dementia, and others. And intends to reach over 150,000 people with its message.
The brand has also set a goal to “make 100 million people aware of the proven health benefits of skin-touch by 2025,” according to press release about the survey data.
And NIVEA Canada has teamed up with Roots of Empathy to train instructors in some 24 schools in that country how to help children build empathy skill. The body care brand is putting CAD$250,000 behind this initiative alone and €20m behind the full global project.
