Vaseline found 3.5 million posts of people sharing their own hacks for a product that's over 150 years old, and instead of ignoring them, they turned those hacks into a lab-tested campaign, a set of paid ads, and eventually a line of new products that sold out on TikTok Shop.

Vaseline is Unilever's petroleum jelly brand, the tub almost everyone already has in a bathroom drawer, and it has annual sales of over €1 billion. Awareness was never the problem, because everyone knows what Vaseline is. The problem was that most people only think of it for chapped lips or dry skin, so the brand needed more reasons for people to reach for it.

The answer was already sitting on social media, where people had spent years finding their own uses for Vaseline, from preventing runners' chafing to setting eyebrows. Vaseline's global brand director Nathalia Amadeu put it simply: "We decided to stop talking and start listening more."

Before making anything, Vaseline ran global social listening to see how people were actually using the product, and they treated the hacks that kept coming up across different countries and years as real consumer behavior rather than a passing trend. That research became the starting point for both the campaign and the products that came after it.

Why it works: Your customers have already done the product research for you, you just have to go read it.

In March 2025 Vaseline launched Vaseline Verified, where Unilever's skincare scientists tested hundreds of viral hacks and gave a Vaseline Verified seal to the ones that worked, while debunking the ones that didn't. They tested things like removing waterproof makeup, stopping hair dye from staining skin, and reducing chafing.

When a creator's hack got verified, the creator got recognized for it, the best performing posts were boosted as official Vaseline ads, and the creators were given affiliate links for TikTok Shop, so they earned commission on every sale that came through their link. That turned a one-off sponsored post into a reason for creators to keep posting.

Vaseline then took the two hacks that had shown up most consistently and turned them into real products called Vaseline Originals, an All-In-One Primer and Highlighter and a Brow Tamer Jelly. They went back and found the people who first shared those hacks in 2008, Lauren Luke, one of YouTube's earliest beauty creators, and Jen Chae, brought them into the launch and their labs, and paid them a share of the sales.