Despite its long established brand heritage, Vaseline demonstrates a strategic transition towards collaborative marketing by integrating creator and community insights into product innovation and future brand development. Does this approach genuinely empower creators, or simply commercialise their ideas?

Back in 2008, beauty blogger Jen Chae shared a simple hack for taming eyebrows with Vaseline jelly, and around the same time Lauren Luke, one of YouTube’s earliest beauty creators, posted her own version of it as a makeup primer. Neither ever got anything from Vaseline for it. In April, Ogilvy Singapore’s Vaseline Originals campaign found both women, credited them by name, and turned their ideas into two official co-created products, which sold out within minutes of their TikTok Live debut on 30 March 2026, according to LBBOnline’s trade coverage of the campaign, published the same week by the advertising-industry outlet. According to WPP’s campaign case study, the two co-created products outsold classic Vaseline Jelly by 466%. The campaign later received a Cannes Lions Gold, multiple Silver Lions and Bronze Lions, as documented by WPP, and won the 2026 APAC Influencer Marketing Grand Prix at the Global Influencer Marketing Awards. It provides a useful stress test for the two course models because the campaign developed in a direction that neither model fully anticipates.

A value chain running in reverse

Libai et al.’s (2025) influencer marketing framework, published in the peer reviewed Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, examines how value is created among firms, influencers, followers and digital platforms. The framework largely presents the firm as initiating marketing decisions such as targeting, positioning and marketing mix development. However, Vaseline Originals reverses this conventional sequence because its product concepts originated in existing creator behaviour rather than within the firm. In 2008, Jen Chae shared a Vaseline brow taming technique, while Lauren Luke popularised its use as a makeup primer. Nearly two decades later, Vaseline transformed these creator developed practices into two official products that publicly credited their originators. Vaseline subsequently formalised and commercialised value that its community had already created through co-creation and revenue sharing with the original creators. Therefore, the framework’s firm to follower orientation does not fully explain cases in which value originates with community members and later flows back to the brand. This represents a meaningful limitation when applying the model to community led product innovation.

A role assigned after the fact

Rundin and Colliander’s (2021) peer reviewed typology, published in the Journal of Advertising, classifies influencers by their control over product creation and marketing communication. Chae and Luke developed their Vaseline hacks in 2008, long before Vaseline identified and formally partnered with them. Their ideas later became official co-created products featuring their identities and stories. Within the typology, they can therefore be interpreted as codesigners because their ideas shaped the products and their stories anchored the communication. WPP confirms that they were featured on the packaging and received a share of every sale.

This reveals a key limitation: the typology overlooks creator influence that emerges before a formal brand partnership. In contrast, Stremersch et al.’s (2025) Customer Insights for Innovation framework better captures how brands identify and transform existing consumer ideas into product innovation through observation, crowdsourcing and co-creation.

Key Takeaway

Vaseline Originals worked because it broke the sequence both models assume: value started with two unpaid creators, not the firm, and a role was only assigned once that influence already existed. Before applying either framework to a campaign, it’s worth checking which direction the value actually travelled, not every case runs the way the theory was written to expect.