L'Oreal Canada in the E-Commerce Scene

This past week was full of a whirlwind of events. However, one of the most memorable moments was definitely speaking with L’Oreal Canada at the Desautels Career Fair about their opportunities in digital marketing and e-commerce. This experience inspired me to look more into how L’Oreal successfully manages multiple brands on e-commerce right now.

I came across an article and video that discuss the partnership between L’Oreal and OSF Global Services, an e-commerce technology services provider. It was interesting to see that L’Oreal decided to outsource the development of an e-commerce platform instead of developing it in-house. The company had the goal of replatforming multiple brands within a limited time frame and thus it was more feasible to collaborate with a specialized and innovative firm. This actually relates as a nice example to what my INSY 333 class discussed last week about firms outsourcing software development when it is not part of their core competency, or when they need the final deliverable within a short time frame. Through working with OSF, L’Oreal was able to deploy four brands including Biotherm, Shu Uemura, Clarisonic and Kerastase within 3 months per brand onto the “core architecture” created.

What intrigued me was the concept of “responsive design”, which OSF implemented to meet L’Oreal’s requirement of a clean and sleek design that not only attracts, but engages customers on the sites. Responsive design “suggests that design and development should respond to the user’s behavior and environment based on screen size, platform and orientation”. I find it so fascinating how everything revolves around the user nowadays. May it be an e-commerce site or even just an overall digital marketing strategy, a push strategy is pretty much completely out of the picture, while the possible dimensions of a pull strategy continuously increase as new opportunities arise to interact with consumers in various aspects of tech.

I would say the key takeaway is that digital is evidently changing the retail landscape, and it’s here to stay. Even a large beauty company like L’Oreal that has traditionally relied on B2B selling to retailers has immersed in the e-commerce scene to greatly increase their conversion rates and revenues. This is only the beginning to a lot more change that digital will bring.

Links:
http://www.osf-global.com/company/newsroom/osf-helped-l-oreal-achieve-a-double-digit-increase-in-sales
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/01/guidelines-for-responsive-web-design/