Creating Remington's Content Catalyst

The beauty category doesn’t wait for anyone. Trends can come and go in the time it takes to scroll a feed, and the brands that win are the ones that are able to show up consistently in culture.

For haircare brand Remington, that raised the question: how do you maintain a clear, consistent brand voice while allowing local markets to create content that resonates in their own culture?

For years, Remington operated much like a B2B business. Success was largely about securing retail listings, with product design and packaging doing much of the heavy lifting. As digital culture continually reshapes the beauty landscape, that model began to show its limits.

Working with WPP Media, it shifted from using centrally produced content towards a model described as “freedom within a framework” - empowering content that is culturally relevant while staying true to the brand.

From Product Packaging To Dopamine-Driven Content

“The beauty landscape has changed so much, and those sorts of comms just don’t resonate in new fast-paced digital environments like TikTok, especially in beauty,” says Kally Boshnakova, creative lead at WPP Media’s Wavemaker. “When you think about those online spaces, you aren’t just competing with other hair brands, you're competing with creators, memes, funny cat videos, news. It’s an emotionally charged, entertainment-driven space. You need to be able to deliver a dopamine hit better than the competition, and that’s a very different type of content to packaging.”

Remington’s challenge was both strategic and operational.

Markets needed the freedom to show up authentically in their own environments — whether that meant its Polish team cracking a joke about their latest episode of Love Island or a team in Mexico can run a TikTok Shop Live session with a favourite influencer — while remaining true to the brand’s authenticity.

Operationally, the challenge was just as complex. Historically, content had been produced centrally by the global team and distributed to local markets to activate. In the age of always-on digital channels, that model simply couldn’t keep up; modern content requires distributed effort.

“Our main objective when we started out with this project was to create an operating system for content – bridging the gap between the brand platform and channel activation,” explains Melissa Howarth, global digital content manager at Spectrum Brands, the owner of Remington. “Making sure that the brand voice can flex to the breadth it needs to across newer environments like TikTok, retailer, YouTube."

Building The Content Catalyst

Internally, the initiative was called ‘The Content Catalyst’ — a name chosen deliberately to signal the goal: rapid creation of content across markets. 

“Our content strategy was a form of cultural navigation — setting the parameters for local markets to feel confident in the brand voice so as to take ownership of content production, in a highly culturally-relevant way, whilst maintaining brand consistency,” outlines Boshnakova. 

“Our style was to become more conversational, but personality-driven content also carries a risk, so it was about setting the parameters for Remington teams to be able to embrace that risk in a safe way,” Howarth agrees.

In order to create its Content Catalyst, the brand conducted a global content audit, analysing historical performance data, brand metrics and reporting. Alongside, interviews and questionnaires gathering insight from local teams across markets to understand how content was currently being created and where the challenges lay.

“Transformational projects often fail because people feel something is being done to them rather than with them,” notes Howarth. “We wanted local markets to genuinely help shape the strategy.”

The result was distilled into a comprehensive playbook — an operating system designed to help anyone in any market understand how to “do content” for the brand.

Launched at the end of 2025, the playbook provides everything from platform guidance and cultural navigation to practical tools and governance. The goal wasn’t simply documentation. It was enabling a shift in mindset.

“We wanted to shift the mindset towards test-and-learn,” she continues. “Personality-driven content carries risk, but the framework gives teams the confidence to take that risk in a safe way.”

Freedom Within The Framework

At the epicentre of the new approach is a clear content platform that bridges Remington’s brand proposition and the ever-changing tides of social channels.

The brand platform ‘Free to Hair’ celebrates people expressing themselves through their hair. It was translated into a content platform called ‘Sparking your hair freedom’ — a personality-driven, entertainment-first approach to content that directly answered the needs and wants of its audience while staying true to the emotional and functional benefits of the brand platform. 

“The content platform was developed using three key pillars: Celebrate, Inspire, and Discover,” explains Howarth. “For each pillar we built content franchises so teams continue an ongoing conversation.

Just as importantly, the framework maps the role of each platform, from TikTok feed pages to TikTok Shop to YouTube, outlining what success looks like in each space.

Crucially, it also includes cultural navigation guidelines, allowing Remington to understand what topics of conversation the brand should be involved in, what its community is talking about that it can contribute to, any adjacent topics to its brand messaging that it can mention. 

The team describes the process as “freedom within a framework”: infrastructure that empowers its local teams to activate - a process that the panel argued is seminal for learning. 

“Consistency comes from clarity, not control,” explains Howarth. “Volume requires distributed creation that’s supported, not micromanaged”

“Social is the most vulnerable expression of the brand voice. You need to be able to hold a conversation, be charming, have a sense of humour, and empathy”, notes Boshnakova. “If you can do that well, and flex the brand voice to that range of emotion that social demands, then you’re good. You and your teams know your brand inside out and are in a position to really take some measured risk and do exciting things.”

And for Remington, its willingness to tackle the changing landscape of the beauty industry is one bound to set the pathway for others to follow.