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Pushing Beauty Innovation Boundaries with Benchmarking

Wisdom Wordui, Associate Principal Scientist at L’Oréal, takes us through his presentation at TMRE 2024, “Benchmarking the Best: Leveraging Competitive Insights to Drive New Product Development and Portfolio Optimization.”

L’Oreal has been around for the past 115 years and is regarded as a leader in the beauty industry. “It’s not surprising that we pride ourselves in saying that innovation is part of our DNA,” says Wordui.

The beauty industry is known for being in continual flux, putting much more importance on research as well as insights. He continues, “The beauty industry is a unique one in terms of the fact that change is the only constant. Trends are ever evolving. Imagine walking into this arena blindfolded. You wouldn’t survive long, would you? Data-driven insights are essential to ensure that we stay ahead of the curve, and we are offering exceptional products that meet our consumers’ needs and expectations.”

Setting the Benchmarking Strategy

Benchmarking has become a key strategy for the company to gauge strengths and weaknesses, identify key drivers, and product renovation and innovation.

“For us, benchmarking really provides a strategic compass for us to be able to continue to innovate, improve our products, and to push boundaries in the beauty industry. For our benchmarking program, our key objective is to assess the competitiveness of our portfolio, our key products and pillars against the competition, and we like to do this in a blind market context,” he points out. “A key outcome of our benchmarking program is to come up with a clear technical brief that the various teams across the business can use to drive product innovations and innovate in the beauty space.”

Benchmarking is really a collaborative effort, expanding beyond the old silo mentality at corporates and moving in a cross-disciplinary approach.

Wordui relates, “Benchmarking unites experts from around the business, from consumer science that I’m a part of, to cross functional partners in R&D, marketing and beyond. Usually, team formation is structured to ensure optimal resource allocation towards a steady life cycle. We adopt a robust methodology consisting of blind in home use test, on our key SKUs as well as competitor SKUs. We typically cast a wide consumer profile utilizing a robust sample size, typically of about 240-plus.”

He adds, “At the heart of our program is how we go about selecting products for our benchmarking studies. We take into consideration a host of factors such as current market data and dynamics. We also use a lot of market intel to decide which products would go into our benchmarking studies. We also use more objective data like Sentry and analytical data to streamline the products that would go into our benchmarking studies. Typically, we target the top ten sellers, both within our company and key external competitors.”

The consumer sample mix is also a key consideration for L’Oreal.

“For our facial cleansers benchmarking study, the design followed a blinded home use test where consumers tested products that we selected for the study. They tested the products in monadic, and we cast a wide net in terms of our consumer recruits, making sure that we included both men and women across various age groupings. They had to be facial category users. We included all skin types, skin tones, ethnicities to make sure that the testing was inclusive enough to yield actionable insights to inform our product development efforts,” says Wordui.

Innovation is the name of the game, and ultimately the company’s consumer studies help inform potential growth drivers.

“Another key output from the analysis is helping us to identify innovation opportunities,” he says. “Just going beyond relative strengths and weaknesses, we are trying to understand what can enable us to really push the boundaries of innovation in the space. By relating the impact of attributes on overall liking to the extent to which the category is delivering it, we are able to come up with four quadrants that help us to clearly identify where those innovation gaps are in the category, where no current product offering is meeting or fulfilling those consumer needs. That prioritizes our innovation efforts moving forward.”

“To drive it all home, it’s all about business impact. What can the business do with the data from our benchmarking studies? There are different ways. One of them is relating it to more analytical methods and instrumental data to come up with clear technical briefs that our various R&D teams can use. We use different approaches to really get to the crux of the matter in terms of what our user needs are, how we are meeting them, the best ways we can go around optimizing our current offerings, any innovation gaps in the category, and also workshop these insights with our cross functional partners to really drive home the business impact for our benchmarking program.”

Wordui concludes, “Benchmarking is not just something that we do to just copy the competition or stay ahead of it, but it’s something that can really help us to push the boundaries of innovation, discover new product opportunity areas, and have a leg up on our competition.”

To learn more about L’Oreal’s benchmarking studies, watch the video of Wisdom Wordui’s presentation at TMRE 2024.

Contributor

  • Matthew Kramer is the Digital Editor for All Things Insights & All Things Innovation. He has over 20 years of experience working in publishing and media companies, on a variety of business-to-business publications, websites and trade shows.

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