L'Oreal: L'Oréal Puts Cannes in the Hands of Chinese Women

Credits & Description:

BRAND: L'Oreal
CATEGORY: Toiletries/Cosmetics
REGION: China
DATE: May - May 2015
AGENCY: Mindshare
MEDIA CHANNEL: Digital,Mobile
Insight
L’Oréal’s partnership with the Cannes Film Festival goes back years; a prime example of L’Oreal glamour globally. But not for young Chinese women; they have deemed it irrelevant and distant.
Mindshare's challenge was to reintroduce L’Oreal Paris & Cannes in a personally relevant way to young Chinese women.
Within China the L’Oréal Paris brand is still considered an older brand – something worn by your mum, and more of a generic “international brand”. The depth of the brand understanding and its heritage of red carpet glamour are still quite limited. In short, brand awareness is high, yet brand engagement is low.
The Cannes film festival partnership is a deep one – with multiple events attended by L’Oréal celebrities, opportunities for brand demonstration and a chance to bring the rich history of L’Oreal Paris alive.
Yet the event remained quite distant to the average young woman in China – an event that would spark a few headlines online, but fundamentally had little personal relevance. Who cares about celebrities in a faraway destination attending an event that they don’t really understand and one whose content they otherwise don’t engage in.
To derive brand and business benefit from the partnership, L’Oréal would need to dramatically change the way its partnership with the festival was viewed by women across the country.
Strategy
Rather than do the tried and dated route of magazine spreads and content seeding, Mindshare took the challenge to make it personal to heart.
A socially-led strategy that leveraged the power of China’s massively popular social platform WeChat.
The agency brought the red carpet glamor of the festival directly to the young women of China on the platform they engage with nearly 63 times a day, across the country.
And it used L’Oréal’s most glamorous female spokeswomen Fan Bingbing to deliver the content personally, directly from her cellphone to theirs.
Mindshare set out to make the L’Oreal Paris and Cannes Film Festival partnership one of the most intimate and personal events for its audience.
Execution
For the first time ever a personal voice invitation was sent out to women on WeChat. Fan Bingbing, China’s most popular female celebrity and spokeswoman, called all women to celebrate the Cannes film festival with her.
When the consumer clicked on the invite, they were taken to the L’Oréal Paris account and were given a unique opportunity to be up-close with what the celebrities were experiencing at the French Rivera from their eyes. Consumers could see the personal videos and photos shared by Fan Bingbing as well as other spokeswomen such as Li Bingbing, Chris Lee and Eva Longoria. For the first time ever, the L’Oréal Paris WeChat account was taken over by its spokeswomen, who posted personal, backstage updates in real-time to young women across China.
The experience for women across China was like nothing they had seen before – suddenly their favourite and most glamorous celebrities were posting directly in their newsfeeds, and they were able to interact directly with them in real-time as the festival progressed.
Technological innovations on WeChat amplified the social experience. For the first time ever, users could voice search on the L’Oreal account and request for Cannes-related updates of their favorite celebrities. Fans could then go to the L’Oreal iconic makeup genius app, which was directly linked, to instantly try their favourite celebrities’ latest looks virtually.
The entire activation was designed to maximise the platform’s effectiveness, encouraging young women to engage and share truly original, exciting content showcasing L’Oréal’s involvement with the festival.
Results
The response from young women across China was incredible – breaking every single historical record for L’Oréal across buzz, engagement, and sales:
Social engagement:
- L’Oréal Paris WeChat fan base grew 78% in 11 days (243K fans to 543K fans – verified authentic)
- 1.6 million likes and 208k comments from the highly engaging content
- Each of the 50 celebrity/KOL Weibo posts were read an average 1.4 million times
Digital campaign performance:
- One of Tencent’s top three WeChat ad performances with a CTR of 13.12%
- Staggeringly low 4% bounce rate throughout 15 days (versus 65% historical benchmark)
Business results:
- Tmall flagship store sales for total L’Oréal Paris Make Up grew by +454% vs. the previous year during campaign period.