L’Oreál Paris Men Expert – Provoking the strategy

L’Oréal Paris Men Expert has completely transformed its communication approach to win young men's hearts by becoming an integrated part of an e-sport community, rather than just another Nordic brand.
The Nordic young male audiences are “mission impossible” given their low involvement within the personal care category driven by discounts and in-store promotions. To make the matters worse, the young men are non-users of commercial media but heavy users of ad-blockers.
L’Oréal Paris knew that to successfully launch their existing personal care product line Hydra Energetic to the young males 2023, it needed to combat the audience’s indifference by catching men’s attention in an entertaining way that seamless fits within their interests.

Through research we uncovered that men are relying on recommendations from others in this category. And that they just love e-sport and gaming…
Presenting Config, a bureau specialized in gaming and e-sport. Config owns Fragbite, the Nordics largest e-sport streaming and gaming community. Our partnership and activation utilized the special and close bond that gaming streamers have with their followers, allowing L’Oréal Paris to talk with them as a peer instead of talking as a brand.

We hacked the system and transformed a simple campaign into an unexpected new partnership that connected prominent streamers’ native content and product demos, display, instream video, branded games and tournaments, and board in-game ads.
So far, the activation reached more than 595.000 young men, outperformed benchmarks by 288% in started streams and 277% in minutes watched. Best of all, it grew sales across all Nordic markets and demonstrated much higher incremental value for products that have been featured within the partnership.

L’Oréal wanted to win over the younger male audience with their Hydra Energetic product range of personal care products. The focus was to build brand recognition and new products’ appeal among the younger male audience aged 18-34, resulting in a sales boost. This required a completely different approach than classic campaign launch tactics.

We aimed to reach this audience by exploring new ways to engage them going beyond conventional methods like ""in-store promotions"" and ""packaging labels"", thereby effectively educating consumers about our products.

Our goal was to discover effective methods for engaging this challenging audience and encouraging them to interact with the brand, while also providing them with information and relatable content about the Hydra Energic products by positively provoke them to pay attention to - and discuss - personal care products that they usually paid little attention to.

As a first step we needed to understand audience’s category behaviors, so we turned to Wavemaker’s Global proprietary research “Momentum” to deeply understand how male purchase decisions are made in the personal care category to unlock growth opportunities.

While men may be opinionated and competitive about many topics, exhorting the benefits of a regular personal care routine simply isn't one of them.
We learned that male consumers rely on “personal recommendations” as the most important earned touchpoint, but also that most (47%) are only triggered to consider a new product when they run low.
This blasé attitude made successfully launching products difficult for L’Oréal as most users are ambivalent to brands, typically opting for the cheapest one as a quick fix.
Secondly, the challenge we face is reaching the audience males 18-34 years effectively taken they spend most of their media time on streaming (72%) and gaming platforms (daily 49%/ monthly 83%) and are very capable of applying ad-blocking (Desktop: Millennials, 50% / GenZ, 48%).

So, we needed to find a different way to “hack the system”.
Using Wavemaker’s insight tool “Choreograph” (data: 2021Q3-2022Q3), we discovered that more than half of Nordic men aged 18-24 are massive e-sports fans (Sweden numbers, but similar trend in Denmark, Norway, Finland):

- 51% participated in e-sports (DK: 60%)
- 47% were fans of e-sports or ProGraming (DK: 56%)
- 48% followed gaming and sports (incl. e-sport) on SoMe
- 30%-49% watched gaming live-streams (Not Twitch: 40% / Twitch: 58%) and e-sport tournaments (47%)

Additionally, this community of gamers is highly engaged. More than 1/3 of them are sharing images of gameplays regularly, half are chatting to friends using a gaming device and more than half of daily gamers are making in-game purchases (Choreograph).
While we were confident that gaming opens an opportunity for L’Oréal Paris Men Expert to win them over, the brand had to be a true fan of gaming, incorporating the products authentically and in connection to their world.

Moving away from talking as a brand to engaging as a peer.

The partnership is run throughout 2023 with quarterly activations of the community. Native content plays a virtual role in our partnership.

We facilitated native content featuring four prominent streamers from each Nordic country, created branded tournaments, integrated website content, in-stream giveaways, and product testing / talks during streams, embedded in-game ads and more. Every quarter we wanted to give users a new fun experience to maintain awareness and recruit new users to the content through new types of games and tournaments as well as continuously engage current users:

First activation was a customized tournament called ""Legends of L’Oréal"" between four of the biggest Nordics steamers playing FIFA, where the community were watching. A tailored L’Oréal Paris Men Expert logo feature was exposed throughout all the streams, encouraging viewers to participate in our competition.

The second activation was flipped up-side down, now inviting Fragbite gamers to sign up for the PUBG ""Legends of L’Oréal""-tournament between the Nordic countries, organized and commented on by the four steamers. And who would not participate in a Nordic tournament with your streaming-idol commenting on your play?

As pre-game entertaining, the four streamers each promoted the Hydra Energetic products in their own streams with hour-long content interacting with their followers based on a conversation about Hydra Energetic products and the upcoming game.

Everything was complimented display- and mobile layout on the website and Fragbite social media, logo exposure in streams, embedded in-game ads and native ads on Fragbites’s website and social media platforms showcasing the products through a famous Fragbite reporter.

As the partnership progresses, additional games will be included in the “Legends of L’Oréal” tournament round three and four with other and new components. Stay tuned for what is coming up next.

Fueled by the insights, L’Oréal Paris Men Expert’s strategy was formulated:

Have a conversation about personal care within a conversation about E-SPORTS.

L’Oréal Paris in Copenhagen serves all Nordic countries and the solution had to reflect this. Not being previously represented within the gaming environment, we had to come up with impactful activation and creative use of formats to catch interest and be relevant for this ad-resistant audience. Additionally given a limited budget, it was crucial to devise a strategy that acted in the four Nordic individual cultures and maximized community belonging.

Taking all that into consideration, we partnered with Config, owner of the website and community Fragbite, that are engaging all four Nordic countries. They have provided us with ample opportunities to engage with the biggest Nordic e-sport community, integrate into branded games and tournaments, native content, and utilize board in-game advertising, all in one place.

By becoming an integrated part of the Fragbite community, L’Oréal Paris would be considered as more relevant compared to using traditional launch campaign tactics. We strongly believed that this would make young males pay more attention to, and consider, Men Expert Hydra products and ultimately make them buy.

We worked closely with Config to create a full user experience to catch attention in an entertaining way that fit naturally within the gaming environment, whilst also guaranteeing brand safety.

The partnership is run throughout 2023 with quarterly activations of the community. Native content plays a virtual role in our partnership. To maximize product visibility and support the branded tournaments, native ads on Fragbites’s website and social media platforms showcase the products through a famous Fragbite reporter. Everything was complimented with in-steams video, display- and mobile layout on the website and social media.

Remember the insight of “men listen to others for recommendations”? With 5.500 registered teams, 25.000 players (50% 25-34 y.o., 27% 18-24 y.o.) and 190.000 followers of their live streams on Twitch (Sweden), the Fragbite community was fundamental for our success and offered a new way to hack the system and engage streamers and their followers alike.

Our goal was to reach a young male audience and become accepted by them in the Nordics, and we did it.

Our activation reached more than 595k male so far: 119% over benchmark.

The levels of engagement are skyrocketing: the activation outperformed benchmarks by 288% in started streams and 277% in minutes watched. Comments in the chat showed that we got it right, acting upon the insight of recommendation among men, with peer’s recommendations such as:

“I’real for men’s deo/spray är riktig nice btw :p” , “KØB KØB” and “Din sellout virkede på mig ja :D”.

But comments also showing that a classic launch campaign utilizing global assets alone would never have hit this audience’s tone of voice:

”Bra att du får oss no-lifers att åtminstone lukta gott”, “Den er fucking god”.

Amazing 7.000 users watched the hourly long pre-game streams to the end. But most importantly the sales are growing as well. L’Oréal witnessed significant growth from February until June 14th, 2023, while the campaign activations were running. The sales numbers for each country are as follows:

+ 14,7% in Norway

+ 17,1% in Finland

+ 8% in Sweden

+ 12,4% in Denmark

Looking at the products shown in the activation specifically, we saw an uplift on all products with the deodorant as high scorer with +23,7% sales uplift. Hydra Energetic products in the partnership are at index162 in incremental value vs those products that were not part of the partnership.

It may be dramatically difficult to catch attention and get people involved in personal care products, but we proved that success is possible if brand communication becomes an integrated part of the target audience lifestyle and essential entertainment.

“It has been such an eye-opening and a bit daunting project to be a part of, to step into a world that was completely unfamiliar territory. We really wanted to make sure we didn’t force ourselves into a community with mass advertisement. It had to fit into the nature and soul of the community, because we want to stay in e-sports for the long haul. And here it has been an absolute pleasure working with Wavemaker and CONFIG bringing their expertise to the table to make sure it became a success, and it has been overwhelming to see how the e-sport community has received us with open arms.” - Product Brand Manager, L’Oréal Paris Men Expert, Kasper Rice.