Content needs explode as L'Oreal manages 'the messy middle'

Global cosmetics brand L’Oreal finds itself managing a problem familiar to many marketers – dealing with the explosion of content required to address the needs of ‘the messy middle'.

According to Anne Guichard, global head of digital products at L’Oreal, this is happening in the context of a shift from a product focus to a consumer and experience focus, and is further compounded by platform proliferation with every new platform asking for its own format or tone.

“There is this complexification of the consumer journey. We call it the messy middle, between the upper and the lower funnel. And in this messy middle, our consumers grab information here and there, and we have to produce the content for this information," she said.

And that complexification continues as the business adapts to new types of content.

“The latest one is how do we get organised to produce 1000s of hours of live streaming that our Asian customers are waiting for?”

She made the comments during a keynote session at Sitecore Symposium in Chicago this week.

L’Oreal also faces a particular issue in its business which Guichard calls the universalisation of beauty and the growing need to reflect the diversity of its global audience.

“When L'Oreal goes into a region, we adapt our content and our product to this culture [and] to this region. So it means as many contents [types] as geographies.”

In such an environment, scalability at speed is critical.

According to Guichard, “When we think innovation, we think immediately how can we scale that innovation. An idea is only a good idea only if we can scale it to our 600 websites. Most of the content websites get more than 1 billion consumer visits. There are 2.2 million assets on certified brands, and more than 10 million services.

“So first we have to build an infrastructure based on [things like] DAMs (digital asset management), content factories, service factories, D2C (direct to consumer) factories and measurement tools to measure the ROI for all of this.”

The other challenge is finding a robust solution that is secure, provides performance and consistency but at the same time has, “...the ability for our brands to build their own space or their own taste, and for our countries to adapt the content and to adapt the service every day.”

"The customer journey is messy," said Guichard. "Our customers might come from Google search, might come from a QR code on a product or they might come from a social platform. But whatever the journey, they all convert to our own website. This is the place we own. It is the heart of our brand.”

Andrew Birmingham travelled to Sitecore Symposium as a guest of Sitecore.