Understanding the challenge
As beauty brands increasingly explore digital personalities, the challenge was in defining a meaningful role for Kenna within the brand ecosystem. This required understanding audience expectations, identifying valuable use cases, and ensuring the character could create long-term engagement rather than becoming a short-lived marketing experiment.
Designing a seamless experience
To bring this vision to life, I helped design an ecosystem of interconnected experiences spanning social content, community engagement, conversational AI, and digital activations. Each touchpoint was designed to reinforce the character's personality while creating a cohesive journey between audience interaction, brand storytelling, and product discovery.
Kenna was reintroduced in 2023 as essence’s virtual brand assistant and storyteller, designed to spark engagement, connection, and innovation. She brings the brand closer to its community by blending playful storytelling with cutting-edge AI capabilities.
Interactive Engagement: Kenna launched as an Instagram DM audiobot, turning routine product questions into fun conversations. She also appeared through AR filters, CGI videos, and festival activations, creating shareable moments that felt alive and relevant.
Storytelling at Scale: Through her defined personality and playful tone, Kenna became a character audiences could connect with. She doesn’t just recommend products, she shares stories, jokes, and cultural references that make essence feel relatable and human.
Innovation Platform: Kenna serves as a testbed for new formats ,from AI-driven chatbots on the website to potential international rollouts and autonomous content creation. Each activation not only entertains but also delivers insights into community preferences, fueling future innovation.
Deliverables of the project included:
Launch of the Instagram DM audiobot with measurable engagement metrics.
Development of social AR filters and interactive festival activations (e.g., Lollapalooza).
CGI video content to bring Kenna to life visually on social platforms.
Prototyping of the AI microservice and website chatbot as scalable digital brand tools.
Establishment of a Kenna playbook defining her personality, tone of voice, and roadmap for future growth
An AI transformation strategy for the Community Management (CM) team, shifting from manual replies to a hybrid model where Kenna automates FAQs, supports keyword- and AI-based interactions, and provides data-driven insights. This not only reduced workload by hundreds of hours but also introduced new performance metrics that the CM team never had access to before
Early results validated the approach:
84% positive feedback from users chatting with Kenna in DMs
6x higher engagement in Instagram conversations
800k unique users reached across activation
