The product was for men. The buyer wasn't.
Audience strategy | Creative strategy | Gifting | Paid social
Gift-buyer creative vs. self-purchase creative
higher AOV
Overall paid ROAS after shifting budget toward gift buyers
revenue week after shifting to a Father's Day gifting strategy
The Client
A DTC men's grooming brand. A premium, design-led alternative to mass-market men's grooming products. A mid-seven-figure brand with Meta as its primary paid acquisition channel. The acquisition strategy had always been built around one assumption: the person using the product was also the person buying it. Customer research revealed a very different buyer profile.
The Challenge
61% of first purchases were made by women buying for a partner, brother, father, or friend. For three years, the paid programme had been built around masculine-coded creative aimed at men buying for themselves. Most of their actual buyers were women looking for a quality gift. The audience assumption was off. The creative reflected it. The entire acquisition strategy had been built around a minority of first-time buyers.
Objective
Reorient acquisition around the actual buyer while preserving the existing self-purchase opportunity. Validate the gifting opportunity before reallocating the budget at scale.
What we did
Built two parallel creative tracks with equal budgets: the existing self-purchase strategy and a new gift-buyer strategy with different hooks, copy, and emotional framing. Ran both strategies head-to-head for six weeks. Also identified that gifting intent spiked sharply around Father's Day, Christmas. Increased investment behind gift-buyer creative during periods of highest gifting intent. Built a dedicated landing-page experience for the gift-buyer journey.
The outcome
- Gift-buyer creative generated 3.3x the ROAS of self-purchase creative during the first six weeks
- The Father's Day campaign delivered the highest-revenue week in the brand's history
- Gift buyers generated 24% higher AOV, driven by gift wrapping and more frequent multi-product purchases
- Overall paid ROAS improved 2.1x as budget shifted toward the higher-performing gift-buyer strategy
"Three years of ads built for a guy. Our actual customer was his girlfriend trying to find him a birthday present. The moment we made an ad for her, everything changed." Co-founder, men's grooming brand
Knowing who uses your product is not the same as knowing who buys it. In gifting-adjacent categories, the product user and buyer are often different people. Yet many brands build their acquisition strategy around only one of them.
