In an attempt to appeal to younger women, L’Oréal SA (Cliché, France) will play down the brand symbol of the rose in the advertising, marketing and retail promotional efforts for its Lancôme products.
According to The New York Times, the new campaign, beginning this month, will swerve from an icon that has dominated the brand’s efforts since 1996.
The company says the flower will remain on packages of Lancôme’s premium-priced products like lipsticks, mascara and fragrances, and it will continue to appear in magazine ads. But the centerpiece of the brand image is now a bold-looking signature, seemingly written by a creative, assertive woman in such a hurry that she renders the circumflex over the “o” in Lancôme as curved rather than pointed — symbolizing the more contemporary customer being sought by the campaign. The worldwide budget is estimated at $300 million, with about a third of that to be spent in the United States.
The changes are to extend beyond the ads, in keeping with efforts by L’Oréal and other large marketers to seek nontraditional methods to forge deeper emotional connections with consumers. In September, L’Oréal plans to open two boutiques that will sell only Lancôme-brand products, one in Manhattan and another in Short Hills, N.J. They are meant to be “concept boutiques,” said Edgar Huber, president for the luxury products division of L’Oréal USA (New York), “where we can express the brand 100 percent like we want it” with more leeway than in the estimated 1600 department stores that sell Lancôme products.
The boutiques will be 1100 square feet, he added, and also serve as “a kind of lab for us” to experiment with sales, marketing and promotional techniques that could be exported to the department stores. There are already three boutiques overseas, two in Hong Kong and one in Shanghai.
Other new elements of the campaign include bigger, more sensual photographs shot by fashion photographer Solve Sundsbo; less reliance on familiar-looking models; headlines written in the first person (“I fight wrinkles with full force”) rather than impersonally (“Makeup for lost time”); and replacing the paragraphs of scientific-sounding verbiage with a handful of pithy bullet points. Also being banished is the longtime Lancôme campaign theme, “Believe in beauty.”
“Our goal is to show the way with a new style,” Marc Dubrule, ceo of Lancôme International in Paris, told The Times, reflective of “what women expect from Lancôme today. They say, ‘Please give us a little more surprise, be a little more daring,’ ” he said of the results from research among 100,000 consumers each year. As a consequence, the new campaign “is based on strong emotion” rather than “long and talkative and sometimes boring reasons” for buying specific products.
As for the rose, “we felt sometimes the advertising was advertising for the rose and not for the products,” Dubrule said, “and women said they did not feel the differentiation between our products and the others.”
In the American market, Lancôme ranks third in department stores, its primary sales channel, behind Estée Lauder and Clinique, both brands sold by the Estée Lauder Cos. (New York).