L’Oreal Professionnel, a competitor in the global professional hair care market, recently launched its latest innovation called Profiber. L’Oreal’s Research laboratories have developed this hair care technology to address damage, by customizing the solution for women consumers down to the very end details on the basis of their hair analysis hence curating a different brand and consumer relationship altogether.
Sussan Verghese, GM, L’Oreal Professionnel says “this is the first time that any brand has customized hair care solutions for end customers planning sharply, down to the very last detail”. In conversation with BW APPLAUSE she talks about the brand’s marketing strategy and the importance of experiential for it.
Talking about the development of ‘Profiber’, Sussan says, “Being a part of L’Oreal Professional I can proudly say that we are one of the few companies who invest a large amount of our resources into research and development to bring end satisfaction to our consumers through our products. Hence, when we came to know about Profiber which is such a technologically advanced product and is certainly going to be the next big thing in hair care we, decided to go for a high integration of technology in the launch event as well which thus involved a laser show and laser entrance too.”
But what forms the overall marketing strategy of L’Oreal Professional? Answering this question Sussan comments, “We are not the consumer products division of the L’Oreal brand as we do not directly engage with consumers. Yes, consumers are an important part of our overall marketing strategy but ours is a B-B-C sort of a marketing model. So we are not present on the ATL advertising front but we heavily use BTL mediums to market ourselves and events like these are an important part of it. We do activations at colleges and malls with salon tie-ups, we also use digital to connect with our TG and a large part of our marketing budget goes to establish a support system at our salons.”
When asked what are the challenges of this marketing model Sussan responds, “One of the most prominent challenges is educating the salon and the staff there about the use of our products and ensuring that the overall experience for a consumer as they walk into a L’Oreal Professionnel salon and spend their 30-45 minutes is enjoyable.”
One Soul Productions executed the launch event for the brand and Sussan could be seen elated with the positive responses she received on its concept and execution. However Susan establishes that she likes working with different event agencies for different events. She comments, “For the Indian Hair Dressing Awards we worked with the Seventy Event Media Group. The parameters of how we select an event agency are based on the budget of the event, its overall concept and what we want to create. We would want to work with different event agencies in the future too.”
