If you’re on BeautyTok as much as I am, you’ve heard of L'Occitane. Maybe you’ve seen creators use the brand’s luxurious hand cream, or its almond-scented shower oil, or…okay, do I have your attention now? Please don’t open your Sephora app just yet. I wrote a blog post for you to read!
In Ep. 145 of Earned, Conor Begley sits down with Vandana Tandon—L’Occitane Group’s Chief Brand Marketing Officer.
To start, Vandana pulls back the curtain on L'Occitane's social transformation—from having a minimal social media presence to becoming a power player in the beauty industry. We dive into L'Occitane's strategic adoption of Instagram and TikTok, and hear how fostering relationships with influencers and content creators has helped the company build word-of-mouth and authentically resonate with new generations of consumers. Next, Vandana discusses how large-scale marketing events and the synergy between organic social and paid ads have significantly boosted product interest and ad performance. She also emphasizes the importance of cultivating a cohesive team culture built on respect and understanding, and shares her strategies for managing teams across the globe. To close the show, Vandana reflects on her personal career journey, and highlights the importance of patience, continuous learning, and building a complementary leadership team.
We’ve included a couple of highlights from the episode below, but be sure to check out the full video above, or tune into the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen!
The following interview has been lightly edited for concision.
Conor Begley: Since you joined L’Occitane at the end of 2021, early 2022, we’ve watched the brand go from a fairly dormant social presence, it was like number 85 in our EMV rankings, to now it's on the verge of the Top 10, and it's grown 136% year-over-year. You've passed CeraVe, Clarins, Dove, Dermalogica. So what is happening? That's a lot of progress in a fairly short period of time, and it really started when you joined.
Vandana Tandon: That's exactly why it's been wild, because we didn't exist [before]. To be honest, I don't even know where we were. And when you think about the U.S., that is not something, for a brand like L'Occitane, that we could win if we were not playing in that whole social ecosystem.
I don't think we actually had a TikTok channel. We were just about touching Instagram as, “Hey, we launched it,” but we didn't do much with it. I think the most exciting part was that this was an opportunity for us to really play and win and tell everyone that L'Occitane is here in North America, specifically in the U.S., which is probably one of the largest beauty markets in the world. How do you win with the brand when you don't have that?
So when I came on board, I think that was the perfect first opportunity to take charge, and get people to understand that L'Occitane is here, and we are a brand that is an authority in so many different categories. When you talk to people, they would say, “Oh yeah, we know the L'Occitane hand cream,” but nobody really knew L'Occitane the brand and what it stood for. It's hard enough to pronounce, right? So it was exciting because we had such an opportunity to tell people about this brand and that was sort of my first win.
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