In a fast digitalising world, L’Oréal is pivoting to a “digital-first” mindset

Welcome to Station F, the biggest startup incubator in the world where L’Oréal is the exclusive beauty partner and where we will be accelerating 10+ beauty startups every year. This is very emblematic of L’Oréal’s strategic initiative to embrace open innovation and the startup ecosystem as a competitive advantage and to co-create the future of the beauty experience. After our investments in our R&I tech incubator in San Francisco, in Founders Factory in London, in Partech, L’Oréal is very excited to step into Station F and to support the next generation of beauty entrepreneurs.

Now looking back at 2017, we can say that L’Oréal is amplifying its digital leadership further on all dimensions: e-commerce leadership, marketing leadership, social leadership, and beauty tech leadership and building new and important competitive advantages for the Group.
E-commerce has passed the 2 billion euro mark x and is now representing 8% of the Group’s revenues and is the third country after the US and China. Growing at more than 30% year-on-year, it significantly contributed to the Group’s growth in 2017 and all our categories are benefiting from this rising online shopping crazyness. China, the US, Korea and the UK are leading the way in this new channel and both our Luxury and Active Cosmetics Divisions are now over 10% of their revenues in ecommerce.

As our consumers are increasingly and massively connecting with our brands online, our marketing is shifting towards a “digital-first” approach. With more than 38% of our media invested into digital platforms, a massive 1 billion audience on our websites and close to 250 million followers on our social networks, our contents need to be adapted to the new creative codes of digital. Today’s consumers crave for ultra-short, impactful, animated contents. Following the visual codes of GIFs and Boomerangs, we call them “Billboards in motion”.
Our Colorista by L’Oréal Paris, Fructis by Garnier, Minéral 89 by Vichy or Vernis à Lèvres by Yves Saint Laurent campaigns were designed for digital native platforms such as Facebook and Instagram and performed really well with our consumers, showing high engagement and shareability rates. Fast paced, colorful and immersive, these campaigns are clearly paving the way for a new marketing at the digital age.

Social connection, engagement and influencer marketing are obviously a growing part of our brands’ marketing strategies. In 2017, 4 of our brands are in the top 10 of the earned media value from being mentioned on social networks, demonstrating that our brands are part of our consumers spontaneous conversations online: L’Oréal Paris, NYX Professional Makeup, Maybelline New York and Urban Decay.
On the same line, more than 170 million reviews have been done for our brands on the different e-commerce platforms and beauty destinations proving the consumers love for our products.
Our brands never stop innovating in the digital field by leveraging the endless possibilities offered by new beauty technologies such as augmented reality and artificial intelligence to provide new and useful services to our consumers such as 3D makeup try on, shade finders, 3D hair color try on, skincare diagnostic, service booking at salon, smart sampling, etc. These services are powerful tools to increase the consumers engagement with our brands and to help them find the right brand, the right product or the right color for them.

Personalisation is becoming central to the beauty business and our brands are taking it very seriously. Our consumers across the globe are also increasingly asking for personalised contents that match their interests for our beauty categories. Through our “Precision Marketing” programme, we are increasingly personalising the contents we send to our consumers to be relevant in their contexts and across their beauty decision journeys and we strive to send them the right message at the right time. We personalise our advertising, our emails, our website landing pages, our products which increases significantly the levels of engagement consumers have with our brands.

L’Oréal digital transformation is moving fast and we are also very much working to make it sustainable.

There is no successful and sustainable digital transformation without clear Return on Investment. Digital ROI (Return on Investment) is a big priority for L’Oréal and our teams are closely following the impact and uplift of our digital investments. The Digital team has developed a set of proprietary powerful tools are now available to operational marketers and media directors to measure real time the performance of their digital campaigns and re-orient their strategic investments towards the best performing channels.

There is no successful and sustainable digital transformation without data protection. L’Oréal Group is committed to respecting consumers data privacy laws all around the world and to ensure that consent and transparency sit at the heart of our relationships with our consumers. We see data protection as an act of corporate social responsibility as much as a legal requirement that will promote trust and loyalty between our brands and their consumers.

There is no successful and sustainable digital transformation without embarking, training and motivating all the employees and teams. A massive upskilling programme has been going on since 3 years with more than 15,500 people trained to digital. L’Oréal has partnered with General Assembly, a leading digital education provider, to develop and roll out an online test to assess the level of digital proficiency of our employees and candidates, providing them with a personalised upskilling track to excellence.

To conclude, thanks to its capacity to adapt and fitness for change, L’Oréal has embraced digital as a powerful new way to connect to our consumers, build new competitive advantages, in a sustainable, respectful and inclusive way.