L’Oreal’s chief digital marketing officer on how to market a beauty brand in 2023

Beauty brand L’Oreal Australia and New Zealand, with the recent appointment of Georgia Hack as chief digital marketing officer (CDMO), is staking its future on data, analytics and customer experience. 

Hack said that data and analytics are key enablers to driving L’Oreal’s marketing strategies, with the company spending a lot of time understanding consumers, market trends and insights to ensure that it accurately understands the performance of the brands under the L’Oreal umbrella and where it might drive growth.  

“In terms of marketing optimisation for data and analytics, we have built an in–house media mix model, which actually takes into account a number of external factors plus the performance of key media channels to enable our teams to improve ROI and effectiveness of media spends,” Hack told AdNews. 

“We actually track the incremental uplift of our media mix model to further optimise performance, so we look at a baseline media plan, and then we run the model through it, and really understand the incrementality.” 

Hack said that customer experience is a big focus at L’Oreal, with the company obsessed with O+O (offline and online) excellence and innovation.  

“For online, we’ve invested in tech solutions – for example, Modiface is a virtual makeup try-on tool that drives engagement and conversion online,” said Hack. 

“Now that we have this proprietary technology, we’re really invested in showcasing that when the consumer utilises Modiface, the conversion uplift is significant. It’s a really engaging tool, and for us, it’s about driving the usage of the tool across our own websites, but then across other retailer websites as well. 

“In terms of offline excellence, we’re focused on really creating that immersive brand experiences in partnership with our key retailers to ultimately tell brand stories.” 

After serving in head of marketing roles for the likes of Witchery and Mimco, and most recently in a nearly five-year stint as GM of marketing communications for David Jones, Hack will oversee Consumer Insights & Analytics, CRM, Loyalty, Customer Experience, E-Commerce, Media and Advocacy and Social Engagement at CDMO at L’Oreal. 

Hack said that there’s three key reasons she came on board, the first being the role providing continued learning from the best minds in marketing and digital, not only within Australia and New Zealand, but globally too. 

“The second reason would be values alignment – the L’Oreal values of passion, innovation, entrepreneurial spirit, open mindedness, a quest for excellence and responsibility are really aligned to my own,” she told AdNews. 

“The third is really the opportunity to have impact as I’ve come at the right time to reinvent the CDMO function within L’Oreal Australia and New Zealand.” 

The CDMO function exists in most L’Oreal markets, but within Australia and New Zealand, it was set up in 2018 with a focus on eCommerce and digital acceleration, a focus further amplified by COVID. 

“So now, my role here is really that driver of marketing and digital transformation – a bit more of a broader role effectively and a really exciting challenge that I’m up for,” Hack said. 

Marketing a brand with such a storied history as L’Oreal – founded in 1909 in France, the company now employs close to 88,000 people worldwide and operates in over 150 countries, netting over 38 billion euros in sales in 2022 – can be tricky, with a need to balance the historical legacy and brand loyalty built up over decades of use with the requirement to keep pace with the times and adapt to the digital world of advertising, marketing and engagement. 

Within the ANZ region, the L’Oreal Group has 56 brands (30 in Australia, 26 in New Zealand) spanning numerous categories, and as a result of each brand being of different stages of maturity in the market, Hack said some brands are focused on awareness and consideration, while others are more in a reinvention journey.  

“For L’Oreal Paris specifically [the 114-year-old brand], we’re constantly finding new ways to reinvent it by staying true to the existing current consumer but recruiting new consumers too,” she said. 

“When we recruit new, it’s often about awareness, but also education in the beauty space, using key social channels to educate consumers about ingredients and efficacy of products to drive that consideration set and then ultimately conversion.” 

Hack said that one of the biggest challenges the brand faces in today’s marketing landscape is the fragmentation of the customer journey. 

“As a marketer, how you show up in the right channel at the right time is challenging and we’re constantly looking at ways to optimise that,” Hack told AdNews. 

“Beauty specifically is constantly evolving from a trend perspective, and there’s always a new product or a new brand coming out. If you think about TikTok and the rise of that channel, we really need to be in real time understanding the trends on social channels to ensure that we’re tailoring our brands and products to consumers when those trends arise. 

“We’ve just done a recent study that says that recommendations from family and friends is crucially important in the beauty space as a key driver of purchase, so it’s really about how you’re in the conversation or whether you’re a conversation starter and that’s obviously a combination of owned, earned and paid media driving that and the stories that we tell about the products, their efficacy and the education that we can provide.” 

Hack said that one way to cut through the fragmentation is capturing first party data, allowing the brand to personalise consumer’s L’Oreal experience, tailoring content that’s relevant to their beauty wants and needs.  

“Not only is that better for the consumer, because we’re having that one-to-one conversation, but it allows us to obviously cut through the noise. I think the rise of social media in terms of engagement and education, being that platform to communicate with consumers in beauty, is advantageous,” said Hack. 

On her priorities for the rest of the year and beyond, Hack said that L’Oreal are about to kick start a project that will assist the beauty brand in aligning the vision and purpose of the CDMO role, set a three-to-five-year vision and explore how its operating model might evolve.  

“We have some really great talent in the business and some really strong external partners and need to harness that throughout the process to ensure we’re delivering on a new model that will drive the business forward,” Hack told AdNews. 

“We’ve been talking a lot about creating the future of marketing and digital, innovating in tech and with our partnerships, and a big one in L’Oreal is continuously upskilling our teams.” 

Hack says one hot topic on her radar, aside from the internal transformation projects, is around how L’Oreal drives continued growth within an inflationary environment.  

“The key lever for that is how we stay really close to our consumer insights and strategy to drive forward,” said Hack. 

“We are doing a project on media optimisation and we’ve built our in-house media mix model to drive effectiveness and we’re constantly updating this model to drive that. In the CRM and loyalty space, we are very focused on first-party data capture and we’ve recently built a number of loyalty programs for our key brands and we need to ensure that we continually provide a compelling value proposition for the Australian beauty consumer.  

“The final focus is really building brands and brand equity in an increasingly fragmented world and a big one in L’Oreal, and particularly in beauty, is our advocacy strategy and how we might innovate and lead more in this space in Australia and New Zealand.”