TikTok has proven its power in making new products and brands go viral. But Vaseline found the platform is also capable of helping to reinvent a 150-year-old brand. 

Unilever, which has owned the brand for the last 35 years, saw social media mentions of Vaseline explode 327% in early February from a year earlier, driven largely by TikTok videos about “slugging.” That term makes an analogy between the trail a slug leaves behind and using petroleum jelly to seal skin overnight, particularly on areas prone to dryness like under eyebrows. The hashtag "slugging method" has over 300 million views on TikTok. 

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While Vaseline’s viral breakout looked spontaneous and stems from habits that go back decades, Unilever had a hand in seeding and stoking the trend. That included a paid social campaign last summer, managed by Team Epiphany, New York, which bills itself as “one of the original influencer marketing agencies” launched in 2004. Once Unilever noticed Vaseline’s TikTok surge beginning last winter, it stepped up paid social and digital support, helping to fuel it further.

Now, it's building on that success and going deeper with its new "See My Skin" campaign from Edelman, designed to counter healthcare bias involving Black, Hispanic and indigenous people.

The takeaways are that success on TikTok—and social media generally—can come from a combination of preparation and patience, plus willingness to jump in with extra dollars if things actually start working.

Slugging's long history

“Slugging” is a term and trend that Kathleen Dunlop, New York-based global brand director of Vaseline, has monitored for nearly eight years. “The first time I saw it actually was 2014,” she said. “I found it on Reddit in a Skincare Addiction subreddit. But the difference this time is TikTok. When TikTok gets ahold of something and creators jump on it, it can go viral.”

Once Unilever saw that happen, it started amplifying the content and the slugging trend with more paid advertising, in part to keep it linked to Vaseline, Dunlop said.

“And it really, really worked,” she said. “Could it have worked without us? Probably. But it wouldn’t have been as big without us jumping in to amplify it. We wanted to own it.”

Unilever’s paid backing of the slugging trend goes back to a campaign last summer by Team Epiphany that included eight creators on TikTok and Instagram.

“We knew our partners needed to have a passion and affinity for Vaseline that pre-dated the work,” said Coltrane Curtis, founder and managing partner of Team Epiphany. “We looked for partners who were undeniably influential in the beauty and skincare realms, but not a celebrity or hair influencer.”

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Beyond slugging

For its latest campaign, which is built around research that shows only 6% of image-based search results about skin conditions show those conditions on skin of color, Vaseline is working with digital health company Hued and medical informatics company VisualDx. To help correct this, the trio created an online database designed to help people search conditions based on skin color and find dermatologists for treatment.

Vaseline’s strength with people of color goes well beyond the U.S. and was one factor in the brand leading Unilever skincare brands in driving high-single-digit sales growth globally last year.

“Vaseline has been in Africa since 1888,” Dunlop said, which happened only 18 years after the brand was founded in Brooklyn. It’s also been in India since 1947 and in Southeast Asia since the 1980s. Even though it’s only been in China for seven years, Dunlop said that country is already Vaseline’s second-biggest market outside the U.S.

While TikTok slugging videos are focused heavily on Vaseline’s original—and least expensive—petroleum jelly product, Dunlop said the buzz has a positive effect across the product range.

“There have been times in our history when we’ve treated them separately,” she said of the petroleum jelly jar vs. the higher-end lotions. “Since I’ve been on the brand, we’ve made a concerted effort to bring them back together, because the jelly itself is the source of our healing credentials. It’s the product that’s been loved and used by people and still fits in all of these beauty routines. It’s inclusive, at an accessible price point and then it’s in all of our lotions. It heals and protects and it’s one reason you can combine face-care active [ingredients] and deliver benefits without irritating the skin. So it’s something we’ve embraced.”

“While we launched in the summer, and slugging is a year-round skincare routine, one reason it may have taken off more recently could be due to dry skin being more prevalent in the winter months,” said Coltrane Curtis, founder and managing partner of Team Epiphany. “When people went looking for skincare solutions, the Vaseline content was already there top of mind.”

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Insights that guided the work “came from an intimate knowledge of Black, brown and other [people of color] communities that have a long and storied history with Vaseline,” Curtis said. Those include “beauty hacks” such as slugging, which he said was a Korean trend.

Making the old new again

Part of the challenge was taking habits that are very old and making them relevant for a new generation, Dunlop said. “There are consumers of Vaseline who have passed down the products from generation to generation, who remember their moms or grandmothers slathering them with Vaseline before going out into the cold before school. So whether it was called slugging or not, it was certainly a tradition.”

Indeed, one current spot in Vaseline’s broader campaign from WPP, backed with PR help from Edelman, features Regina King in a “Your Skin Is My Story” spot in which King tells about her grandmother’s love of the brand.

“Because so many were already familiar with Vaseline as a staple in their households growing up, we really focused on re-framing content in the form of tips, tricks, hacks and educational purposes for intentional content to make this a mainstay trend,” Curtis said.

Team Epiphany looked to assemble a diverse “aspirational but relatable” group of macro and micro-influencers “to reach our target audiences as they look for products designed to combat skin issues that are a particular concern for melanated skin at a reasonable price point,” he said.