L’Oréal’s Business Strategies
Here are the business strategies that have taken L’Oréal to world number one position in the beauty and cosmetics industry. As an entrepreneur, business owner or manager, you can actually adopt these strategies to your business and experience similar success.
Continue To Improve On Your Products
You cannot afford not to continue to improve on the value your product gives to your customers. If you fail to improve on your product quality, it would either give room for new entrants with better offers into the market to upstage you, or opportunity to your competitors to create and present better product than yours to your target customers.
If you fail to make your product better from time to time, you may soon find you are no longer relevant in the market place – it’s that dangerous.
Eugène Schueller was able to easily get into, and penetrate the beauty and cosmetics industry in the early 1900s, because he noticed a huge gap between women’s desire and expectation for their dyed hair and the available hair dyes. By improving on the existing dyes therefore to meet women’s needs, he immediately captured a sizeable portion of the market in only two years.
Find Ways To Promote Your Business Affordably
Promoting your business without doubt is very important to its success. Even if you have great product in terms of the value it gives to people who use it, but not many people who would have love to get it know about it, you will not record good sales, and your cash flow will suffer. It may become very difficult keeping the business going because you don’t have the cash to cover overhead and create more products.
You need to find cheap or free means of promoting your business, which are nevertheless effective, especially at the early stage of your business when you are working on a tight budget.
Schueller’s promotional platform, which cost him nothing except for his time and expertise was writing and editing the science column of La Coiffure de Paris magazine, which was first published in 1909. Through this magazine, which he eventually bought in 1912, Schueller was able to bring L’Oréal to the attention of his target market.
Make Your Product Irresistible For Distributors
There are stakeholders or certain people who are instrumental to the success of your business, and who you must recognize and relate with in a win-win situation. One of such people are your distributors. Your distributors can affect your sales positively or negatively depending on how well they are motivated to sell your products.
Give people great offer to distribute your product, and they will consider you first over the competition, and help you achieve your sales goals.
Schueller knew this, and that was why he provided mouth-watering incentives to hair stylist to promote and distribute L’Oréal products. He established a hair-colouring school, which provided training to hair stylists, who in return became motivated to recommend the company’s products to their clients.
Take Position Early On Evolving Trends
You need to keep an eye on evolving trends taking place in your industry and take position early. Most businesses start coming into an industry when it seems to be booming, but they will always be behind those that came first before the boom time. The early comers would have taken the first position in people’s minds, which is a strong competitive advantage to them.
By creating L’Oréal Blanc bleaching powder in 1929 to offer solution to brunettes who Schueller believed would want to become blonde following that trend he observed in the late 1920s, Schueller was positioning L’Oréal for huge gains when the trend becomes matured. And it did happen, millions of brunettes did want to become blonde in the 1930 and 1940s, resulting in millions of sales for L’Oréal Blanc bleaching powder.
Take Advantage Of Events
Many events that take place around you usually hold good opportunity for your business to make money. Take note of these events and think of how possibly your business can benefit from them. With the ideas you will generate, you will be surprised how much opportunities you have been missing all this time.
By thinking about how its company was going to benefit from the first paid holidays introduced by the French Government in 1936, L’Oréal came up with L’Oréal’s Ambre Solaire, which immediately became the leader in the new suntan market.
Develop The Ability To Continue To Create Innovative Products
Attaining and remaining top in your industry require the ability to create and continue to develop innovative products. You therefore need to establish a system that will enable you to do that. You could set up a research and development unit or something similar.
L’Oréal’s success in the several decades of its existence can be attributed largely to its huge investment in research and development, which enable it to create many top selling products. From 500 staff in its research and development unit in 1970 to 1000 by 1984 tells how much serious the company considered it.
Read L’Oréal Business Success Story here
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