Health and beauty categories are increasingly driven by digital channels, both for direct online purchase and research online for buy in store. Digital channels provide an opportunity as an excellent medium to communicate often complex information and points of difference that cannot be shared on packaging or point of sale media. Indeed for some categories, digital is a component of more than 80% of consumer purchase journeys.
L’Oréal has been an early adopter in leveraging digital channels as a key component of its global strategy. Not only is L’Oréal’s target demographic generally more predisposed to digital research, purchase and content sharing, but with so many iconic marque’s, driving brand equity is crucial in an increasingly competitive and fragmented category.
However, with over 10,000 products across a diversity of health and beauty categories, managing product information for a business the size of L’Oréal Australia is a real challenge. This is compounded by the plethora of channels and organisations needing to receive this product content efficiently and in a timely way; including small to major traditional retailers, a diversity of pure play online retailers, internal teams and own brand sites. In this context, collating, managing and distributing product content is an enormous business process effort. If not executed well, instead of being an opportunity, the generation and distribution of product content would become a barrier to success.
To solve this problem, L’Oréal Australia partnered with SKUvantage in 2014 and employed their SKUlibrary platform to manage, share and distribute product content in digital channels. With such a large and diverse organisation, L’Oréal Australia gave the topic of product content an owner within the business who worked with SKUvantage to educate brand teams on the importance of digital product content and support them in populating the SKUlibrary platform. But L’Oréal Australia was not satisfied with simply delivering vanilla product content into retailers, and wanted to utilise more opportunities available to drive value from its product content.
L’Oréal Australia also worked with SKUvantage to deliver premium rich content into retailers’ websites, feeds product content to its own internal e-commerce sites, and also developed a feed from their ERP system to SKUlibrary to ensure an efficient alignment of assets between systems. SKUvantage and the SKUlibrary platform became a critical success factor in their digital success. By working together with SKUvantage, L’Oréal Australia has achieved broad digital leadership within its categories. This success has supported the delivery of its broader business objectives in all channels along the path to purchase, both online and in store.
To learn how SKUvantage can help your brand seize the opportunity of digital channels go to www.skulibrary.com/leading.
