Reinventing The Beauty of Tomorrow Through Health and Wellness

Reinventing The Beauty of Tomorrow Through Health and Wellness

By Clara Lefort, Kanika Loomba, Meike Friederich, Giulia Isidori and Aasit Thakkar

MSc in Marketing & Creativity students uncover the future intersection of beauty, health, and wellness in collaboration with L’Oréal Group. 

As MSc in Marketing & Creativity students, we worked alongside L’Oréal’s BeautyTech & Innovation Incubator on our Company Consultancy Project. Our brief was to identify the future of beauty with respect to the growing trend in health and wellness. The process uncovered valuable insights for L’Oréal executives. 

For eight weeks, our team got the opportunity to work alongside some of the most creative and innovation-focused minds at L’Oréal. To begin, we were briefed by the Global Vice President of the L’Oréal Technology Incubator, Guive Balooch, and were introduced to the group’s latest innovations, including Perso – awarded one of 2020’s best innovations by Time Magazine

Tackling a variety of consumer needs and beauty trends, it was evident from this initial presentation that the world of beauty was changing at a rapid pace. From the self-love movement to the DIY trend that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic, beauty-focused brands were now more than ever needing to adjust not only their portfolio of product offering, but their overall approach to beauty. 

With the brief in hand – how could we reinvent the beauty of tomorrow through health and wellness? – we applied the core frameworks of the MSc in Marketing & Creativity to uncover meaningful insight and opportunities for value-creation at L’Oréal. It was a topic that required a lot of research, both secondary and primary. Through deep-dive interviews and surveys, and consistent questioning of the problem, our team had invaluable insights into key moments of control loss over daily routines. 

This allowed us to uncover a very interesting opportunity to enable consumers to reclaim responsibility for their own well-being throughout the day. Take for example the moment you shower: you feel great but the feeling expires throughout your day. This affects your mood. We found it valuable to focus on solving age-old beauty problems with the technology of tomorrow. With that said, the students next looked to L’Oréal’s core capabilities in beauty to identify how the group could disrupt the market. 

By week eight, our team had developed an ingenious integrated solution that consisted of both a hardware device and a stand-alone platform. The hardware solution enables consumers a moment of escape throughout their day similar in mental-effect to having a portable shower. It could be enhanced with sheet-mask attachés from L’Oréal’s extensive portfolio of brands. The hardware device would be just one foray for L’Oréal into an all-new wellness ecosystem. This ecosystem is the go-to platform for short and long-term fixes around health, wellness and beauty – and is like the “Google of Beauty.” We’re very excited about this platform because it is a critical starting point for the BeautyTech Incubator. The future possibilities are endless. 

Mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive, the two solutions were highly commended by L’Oreal executives in the final pitch.

Over the entire length of the project, the rigors of the MSc in Marketing & Creativity were put to a real-world test. From problem definition and the opportunity discovery to design and go-to-market rollout, our team proved the merits of creative problem solving and thinking for one of the world’s foremost players in the beauty landscape. 

Guive Balooch offered congratulations to us upon final delivery of the project, and said he was “beyond impressed.” 

Special thanks to Marie Taillard, Gregoire Charraud, Helga Malaprade and Franck Giron for their guidance and inputs. With their help we were able to really challenge ourselves and put our creative brains to use. And of course, thank you L’Oréal and ESCP for the opportunity!