L’Oreal takes battle for China’s online shoppers to Cannes

Bloomberg

Chinese actress Li Yuchun glides down the hallway of Cannes’ Hotel Martinez in a tuxedo-inspired Jean Paul Gaultier gown and blue-gray pixie haircut, with a pack of L’Oreal videographers trotting backward to stay out of the frame.
After striking a few poses on the marble staircase, she heads for the red carpet. The footage is rushed to L’Oreal’s editing suite, where dozens of editors and producers stitch together clips to post everywhere from Instagram to China’s Weibo within hours of the shoot.
This is how the world’s biggest beauty brand promotes itself in the smartphone age. With foot traffic sliding in drugstores, eyeballs shifting from televisions to mobile screens and China’s digitally savvy consumers driving growth, L’Oreal SA pulled out all the stops at the world’s most watched film festival.
L’Oreal Paris, the company’s flagship consumer brand, is using its unrivaled scale to fund ever-bigger events, including a live talk show on the Cannes beach with film stars like Jane Fonda and Isabelle Adjani.
“Cannes is a spectacular opportunity for us to produce a lot of content, and this year we wanted to take it even further,” said L’Oreal Paris’s global brand president, Pierre-
Emmanuel Angeloglou, speaking from a two-story video studio built for the occasion on the Cannes beach. “The more we can combine accessibility and direct contact with consumers with the aspirational nature and beauty of cinema, the better.”

Cannes Studio
The studio, backed by yachts crossing the Mediterranean harbour and equipped with a vintage convertible for capturing models tossing their hair in the breeze, marked a change of scenery from the celebrity magazines and nightly news shows that
L’Oreal used to rely on to get out its marketing message.
Staying in the spotlight with a constant flow of content over Facebook, Instagram and Chinese networks like Weibo and WeChat has become a business imperative for L’Oreal as it navigates the decline of traditional media and a wave of retail closures. The Chinese market, already L’Oreal’s second biggest after the US, with roughly $2.6 billion in sales last year, is undergoing what CEO Jean-Paul Agon calls a “particularly violent” shift to e-commerce, and online sales made up more than a third of sales last year.
“L’Oreal can’t just depend on their reputation,” said Delphine Dion, marketing professor at Essec Business School near Paris, citing mounting competition from homegrown competitors in China, social-media-driven upstarts like LVMH’s Fenty Beauty by Rihanna and South Korean beauty brands like Mizon.
“They have to keep making buzz online or else they’ll lose out.”
L’Oreal’s partnerships with Instagram influencers and beauty-blogging YouTube stars have helped drive booming makeup sales, Dion said, so it makes sense for the company to step up its digital efforts with more established representatives like Julianne Moore and China’s Li.
In the flurry of videos L’Oreal produced during the festival, red-carpet struts were interspersed with product demos and interviews with the brand’s ambassadors.
The combination of staging elaborate events, publicising them via
social media and easing the path to points of sale is showing signs of success. If China gets special treatment
in L’Oreal’s online efforts it’s not only because of the scale of the opportunity, but because lessons learned in
the most advanced market for
e-commerce can be exported around the world.