L’Oréal ups its digital focus to help achieve Group's overall strategy

In its Annual Report for 2014, L’Oréal says 15.7% of media spending is on digital, and the focus is to remain as it sees growth in these channels accelerating.

The cosmetics giant also reaffirmed its commitment to accelerating the digital age in all digital beauty segments: e-commerce, data technologies and interaction with consumers, with the appointment of Lubomira Rochet as Chief Digital Officer.

Now, Rochet says that the digital ambition for the cosmetics maker is to anchor the Group’s strategy, which is the conquest of the next billion consumers.

“Beauty and digital is really a perfect match. Beauty is one of the most searched terms on the internet with 4 billion queries per year,”​ she says.

“What digital allows us to do is really to reach consumers we did not reach before like the millennials – those young, smart, connected consumers – and sell our products to consumers we did not sell to before, especially in the developing world.”​

App connection​

In the information age, Rochet says that digital allows L’Oréal to better connect with its consumers and especially through services, with its L’Oreal Paris brand’s MakeUp Genius app as a great example.

“The launch of MakeUp Genius was very striking as it reached a large number of consumers and helped them try and discover our products before buying them,”​ she adds.

The success of this app has also seen the development of a second, Shade Genius, due to be launched in September, which aims at helping users to find their perfect foundation shade.

L’Oréal Paris is a great example of how the Group is improving its digital focus, with over 25 million social media followers, and has recently helped to promote video-in-video commentary app Twicer, developed by California-based Kwarter.

Busy-ness​

Aside from the apps, Rochet adds that personalisation of the Group’s interaction with its consumers through the smart use of big data is also of great importance to its strategy, as is e-commerce.

“What is most striking is the acceleration of e-commerce,”​ she says. “Especially in China,”​ where the Group has seen 86.7% growth.

In fact, in China, e-commerce already accounts for 10% of L’Oréal sales, and more than 15% for brands like Vichy, La Roche-Posay andMagic. These promising results are underpinned by partnerships with online distributors like Alibaba and Tmall.

Elsewhere under the new strategy, L’Oréal Research and Innovation has also created an innovation incubator for connected beauty in Silicon Valley in the US in order to pair the group’s cosmetics knowledge with avant-garde technologies to invent the products and services of the future.