Melbourne--L'Oreal

The first station of Melbourne second day company visit is L’oreal which is one of the most successful companies in skin health and cosmetic industry. We did not spend a lot of time in the workplace visit, but we spent a lot of time to listen! Listen to the presenters explained how L’oreal marketing team create magic! Have a glance at the goodies bags beside us, I guaranteed this would be the most excited company visit for girls.

The first presenter is Helen Prudy, a beautiful lady in green dress, she gave us a brief introduction of the schedule of today’s presentation, mentioned L’oreal also recruit interns and employees from Monash, which made us all excited. The second presenter introduced by Helen. She is Sarah Keating, who is the HR director of L’oreal Australia and New Zealand. The history and achievements of L’oreal can be summarised into:

• L’oreal is created in 1909
• Owned 23 global brand, covered 130 contries 
• $19.5 billion sales in 2010, which made L’oreal
• became the No.1 cosmetics company worldwide.
• Spent $665 million on R&D investment in 2010
• 64,000 employees, 47 billion units manufactured
• annually.

Continuously introduced by Sarah, she explained beauty is a different concept to different people, what L’oreal do is express beauty in different ways, try to understand what customers need. Therefore, research is the core step of L’oreal to understand what customers’ thoughts behind beauty. At the same time, innovation is a permanent quest for L’oreal to create high quality products. The distribution channels in L’oreal include professional products, consumer products, which sell in coles, pharmacy, convenience store; luxury Products,limited distribution brands with their own identity; active cosmetics, for people who have special skin condition. Sarah also talked about the challenges for L’oreal. Such as the co-branding with The Body Shop, the strategic thinking behind it is to enhance sustainable and environmental friendly image of L’oreal. It is an ethical, sustainable move of the company, not just a commercial decision. In addition, Sarah mentioned, as L’oreal is a global brand managing within countries, culture differences in one of the inevitable challenges for company to overcome. Hence, localization strategy is applied for different countries, ensuring the products suit for different kind of skin, and different sense of beauty. That’s why L’oreal highly focuses on technology. Technology always come first when launching a product. With sophisticated technology as a basic support to the company, L’oreal made the sales miracle in the world.

Then, Lauren gave us a case-study based presentation about Garnier new product launch. Research, research, and research, that is the most frequent words I can heard from Lauren, the key to new product launch into the market basically based on whether the company can understand and satisfy customers' needs. Therefore, research is a fundamental step for the company to understand the trend of customer preferences.

At last, George the brand trainer of L'oreal presented to us to explain the charm of L'oreal, his amazing presentation skills impressed everyone. Passion, is truly one of the keys for employees to develop engagement and encouraging them to contribute.

P.S.me and Allan did L'Oreal company summaries.