L'Oreal Paris

Sadly, our trip to Paris was almost over. But the day before we left, we spent Memorial Day meeting with Mr. Georges-Edouard Dias and Ms. Marelina Kakiris at L’Oreal Paris. After a long journey to the outskirts of Paris, we arrived at L’Oreal at 12:30, just in time for lunch! We were escorted into a huge and very posh dining room where we were served a three course lunch, topped off with as much wine as we could drink! The first course was a green salad served with smoked salmon, the second course was a delicious plate of pork covered with a creamy sauce, served with roasted mushrooms and some sort of side of potato. But, the best part of our lunch—and I think we can all agree—was the dessert. For dessert, we had a fruit tart covered with strawberry sauce and coupled coffee. During lunch, we had the rare opportunity to talk openly with Georges-Edouard and Marelina about L’Oreals’s global marketing strategy and the future of the company.

And now down to business. After lunch, we went upstairs to a conference room where Georges-Edouard gave us a wonderful, interactive presentation titled Rebooting Marketing—A Digital Transformation. In the presentation we learned that L’Oreal is the #1 Cosmetics group in the world with an unequalled brand portfolio, they had 17.5B in Euro sales last year, they have 61,000 employees world-wide, they spent 53.3M Euro in Research and Development last year, and they offer consumers 25 global brands. Georges-Edouard said that “digital is a powerful force for change” and predicted that there will be 2 Billion people online in 2013. This is a huge potential consumer base that L’Oreal is working to target! L’Oreal feels that they need to find a new and different way to advertise to their customers because traditional newspaper and magazine ads are being phased out while TV and Internet ads are becoming more popular.

Because of the increasing popularity of social media amongst young people, L’Oreal has started creating targeted messages in order to find a brand digital footprint. The goal of the brand digital footprint is to make the customer fall in love and stay in love with the brand. Ultimately, these targeted messages will be a conversation platform where the brand engages with the customer to create lifelong loyalty. Georges-Edouard also spoke about branded entertainment as a new form of advertising. An example of branded entertainment would be to strategically place L’Oreal brands in popular movies and TV shows such as Sex and the City where the target consumers will be sure to see the images. L’Oreal has already started doing this with Garnier, one of their brands. The style and design show Project Runway on Bravo features L’Oreal Paris makeup and Garnier hair products and stylists for the models before they walk the runway. It is interesting that because of different national regulations, this type of advertising is totally acceptable in the United States, but is not allowed in any EU country because of a law against placing products in TV and film.

Georges-Edouard also spoke about L’Oreal’s campaign to start targeting a new population of potential consumers in Africa. He said that since many people in Africa are not online, L’Oreal needed to create a new niche for their brands in Africa. So, their goal is to piggyback on the fact that most Africans either have their own cell phone or share one with a few people in their villages. Many Africans also do some of their necessity shopping on their phones since it is dangerous to carry cash with them on the streets. L’Oreal hopes to eventually “create an economy based on a payment system” that will allow “digital to be the enabler of development”. This fascinated me because I never thought about how different each and every country in the world really is. You can’t come up with one marketing/advertising campaign that can be applied successfully to every culture in the world. L’Oreal is using their creativity to bridge the gap between these different cultures which explains why they are the number one cosmetics company in the world.