The beauty industry setting is highly competitive. Although L’Oréal’s statements lack specificity, they are very straightforward, helping to get a proper understanding of the company.
Due to high coopetition rates, even beauty companies with a strong market presence and a developed competitive advantage need to reinforce their PR and marketing approaches. The approach that L’Oréal adopts in its PR and marketing efforts aligns with its corporate strategy on multiple levels. For example, on the corporate one, the use of its attention to quality and its mission of promoting beauty as L’Oréal’s competitive advantage has been working perfectly for the company (Hambrick and Fredrikson, 2005). Similarly, when applying the statement in question to business-level operations, one will notice the emphasis on the need to reinforce the competitive advantage based on quality and exquisiteness with the help of marketing and PR tools (Camillus et al., 2008; Johnson et al., 2020).
Namely, L’Oréal’s brand is represented as the path to beauty, which embodies the quintessence of the company’s philosophy of quality and luxury perfectly (Sevilay, 2020; Ali et al., 2018). Finally, on the functional level, L’Oréal’s strategy statements illustrate that the company seeks to procure the best resources for creating its beauty products, which aligns with its recent statements (Wajdi et al., 2020; Jan et al., 2019).
The selected strategy statement appears to be helpful for the organization for three key reasons. Namely, it supports the idea of impeccable quality management, establishes its customers’ needs as its priority, and represents its brand properly as a luxury item. However, there are two problems with the statement in question, namely, its vagueness and the absence of explanations as to how L’Oréal achieves its goal. Indeed, the statement seeks to convey an important message about quality and communication, but does not show how it reaches excellence in these areas. The need to align the corporate strategy with a company’s mission and vision is a particularly vital aspect of enhancing corporate performance (Espahbodi et al., 2019; Aina & Solikin, 2020).
Despite being not quite specific or eloquent, L’Oréal’s statements align with its mission and different levels of its corporate strategy, which increases the company’s performance efficacy. Namely, the open attitude of the organization attracts the clients, whereas its focus on its mission makes its objectives and intentions very transparent. As a result, L’Oréal creates a very distinct and trustworthy image that conveys the company’s message directly, preventing misunderstandings.
Reference List
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Ali, A. A. E. B. R., Othman, A. K., Hassan, F. H., Zainudin, M. I. and Fadzil, A. S. A. (2018) ‘Branding strategy on economic sustainability among personal care and cosmetics customers’, International Journal of Asian Social Science, 8(11), pp. 995-1004. Web.
Camillus, J. C. (2008) ‘Strategy as a Wicked Problem’, Harvard Business Review, pp. 99-106.
Espahbodi, L., Espahbodi, R., Juma, N. and Westbrook, A. (2019) ‘Sustainability priorities, corporate strategy, and investor behavior’, Review of Financial Economics, 37(1), pp. 149-167. Web.
Hambrick, D. and Fredrikson, J. (2005) ‘Are you sure you have a strategy?’, Academy of Management Review Executive, 19(4), pp. 51-62. Web.
Jan, A. D. A. and Victor, S. (2019) ‘Measuring the effectiveness of segmentation, targeting and positioning strategy of L’oreal products in Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’, IJO-International Journal of Business Management, 2(09), pp. 68-79. Web.
Johnson, G., Whittington, R., Regna, P., Angwin, D., Johnson, G. and Scholes, K. (2020) Exploring strategy: text and cases. 12th edn. Pearson Education Limited, United Kingdom.
Sevilay, U. L. A. Ş. (2020) ‘Augmented reality in luxury brand communication in the digital transformation process: L’Oreal example’, OPUS Uluslararası Toplum Araştırmaları Dergisi, 15(21), pp. 12-33. Web.
Wajdi, M. F., Aji, H. M. and Muhammad, S. (2020) ‘Factors affecting the intention to purchase halal cosmetics on Instagram: E-WOM and brand image’, Asian Journal of Islamic Management, 2(1), pp. 1-11. Web.