Your mission if you choose to accept it…

On Monday 15th April, Marie Taillard (L’Oréal Professor of Creativity Marketing, Co-Director of the MSc in Marketing & Creativity, and Director of the Creativity Marketing Centre @ ESCP Business School) and Brad Fujimoto (Head of the MSc in International Luxury Management at IFM) were honored to welcome Irène Garcia Turcan, International Digital Director, and Diane Hecquet, Digital Transformation Manager, both of Yves Saint Laurent Beauty, to launch the 2019 Big Picture Challenge.

Before getting the brief, Diane and Irène gave us a lot of very interesting input into YSL’s digital strategy. We understood that D2C challenges are all about data.

How to make boutiques and e-boutiques attractive destinations? The way YSL Beauty sells products, the way YSL Beauty do business today, – these things will change in the next five to ten years. How can YSL manage its solid brand legacy and meet the expectations of future generations?

Basically, the growth is driven by Millennials, but how can YSL Beauty catch the Gen-Z generation without losing the DNA of the brand?

For this project, our brief was to develop and present a vision of what will be a YSL-relevant, Gen-Z compliant shopping experience in 2025. This concept had to be presented in a one-minute original video and three-slide PowerPoint. Why is this vision innovative? What value does the experience create for the consumer? What is the business model behind it?

Because film making is not an easy task, we first received technical tips from Alison Gordon. Marie Taillard and Brad Fujimoto ran another plenary session to explain the ways to address the problem and answer the question.

We started our group work in the afternoon. It was a very long day… and that was merely the beginning!