L’Oréal is one of the world’s oldest cosmetic and beauty brands. Founded in 1909, by Eugène Schueller, started off by formulating hair dyes and selling them to hairdressers in Paris. Since its inception, L’Oréal never looked back, focusing on diversifying their offerings and expanding their organization. During the late ‘50s, L’Oréal’s vision of “Le Grand L’Oréal” started taking shape, slowly expanding internationally and strategically acquiring other brands. Throughout their journey and up until today, L’Oréal placed heavy importance on brand image and what they stood for.
Now, we’re about to take a sneak peek into how L’Oréal manages to maintain their PR, marketing and communications across stakeholders.
Public Relations (PR)
- Brand Reputation Management: L’Oréal has always maintained its efforts to maintain a positive brand image to the public and ensuring that all the work being put in towards innovations and new product launches are published and noticed by the public.
- Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR): L’Oréal has placed heavy emphasis on environmental sustainability. Throughout their history they’ve launched campaigns to prove that they champion sustainability efforts, diversity and inclusion and societal progress. They aim to strengthen their reputation as a forward-facing brand.
- Influencer Collaborations: L’Oréal often collaborates with influencers and popular figures to boost their popularity among the public and their customers. Their collaborations prove their cultural relevance and inclusivity across borders.
Marketing
- Product Diversification: L’Oréal, since the late ‘50s has made strategic acquisitions like Garnier, Yves Saint Laurent, Prada, Diesel, Kiehl’s, CeraVe, LaRoche Posay and more. Added to their brand portfolio are the plethora of products that L’Oréal and all their sub brands have to offer. L’Oréal has employed different marketing strategies to appeal to various demographics.
- Digital Marketing: Since the advent of social media and the internet, L’Oréal has expanded its marketing to digital platforms. Using influencer marketing, social media campaigns and collaborations, they’ve expanded their consumer base and succeeded in targeting the youth.
- Personalization and Technology: As technology advances with AI, being commonplace, L’Oréal have used this technology to their advantage. virtual try-ons, AI-driven product recommendations, and augmented reality experiences are some tools being used to tailor consumer choices and create new shopping experiences for them.
Communications
- Global and Local Messaging: L’Oréal’s communications strategy blends their overarching organizational goals with local adaptation. L’Oréal consistently maintains a single brand image, but tailor communications to show their stakeholders and the public their commitment to diversity and inclusion.
- Sustainability and Ethics: L’Oréal maintains transparency about their sustainability goals and ethics that they maintain, ensuring to detail the source of their ingredients, eco-friendly packaging and adhering to fair-trade practices.
- Internal Communications: L’Oréal’s ensures that its employees are in the loop about the brand’s values, goals, and strategies, ensuring a unified company culture. Training programs and engagement initiatives keep the workforce committed to the organization’s vision and mission.
Now let’s look at one of L’Oréal’s past campaigns to better understand how PR, marketing and communications function parallelly at the organization.
‘Because you’re worth it’ campaign
In the 21st century, body positivity and self-empowerment have become a very important talking point in society. L’Oréal recognized issues women were facing back in 1973, when this campaign was launched. To that end, L’Oréal launched the ‘because you’re worth it’ campaign, which went down as one of their most successful and iconic campaigns. It ended up becoming one of L’Oréal’s most recognizable slogans, that symbolized women empowerment.
At a marketing standpoint, L’Oréal used a brilliant strategy, upholding women as individuals who deserved the best of the best. They showed that women were not just customers to them and that they deserved high quality beauty and care products. At the time of this campaign was launched, the feminist movement was steadily gaining momentum, and L’Oréal took this as an opportunity to align their goals with feminism.
The PR and communications angle to this campaign emphasized on creating a lasting impression and elicit an emotional response from their target audience, women. They used several communications media like print and TV commercials. As the years went by and more platforms were invented, this campaign also spread to digital platforms. Their consistency in spreading the message of ‘because you’re worth it’, paid off and made this a very recognizable slogan.
