This week was about Online Social Networks. About one year ago I have been an intern at L’Oréal. One of my tasks was to keep our page on Facebook up to date. We use Facebook mainly as a marketing tool. For example we post our newest advertisements. Furthermore we post our products, pictures of creative hairstyles we create at show and other marketing related notices. An advantage of this strategy is that it is a cheap way to generate publicity over a huge public. On the other hand, only posting marketing materials can be too unilateral. Indeed customers can experience it as a lot of spam of just advertisements. Besides, it is also really important to monitor: What is the demand of the network? Firm informedeness or consumer informedness. In this case they use Facebook mostly for consumer informedness, not to listen to customers.
A competitor of L’Oreal Professionnel is Sebastiaan Professionnel. They use Facebook at a totally different way. Instead of communicate unidirectional, they provoke a conversation with their customers. For example they ask their customers explicit for their opinion. An advantage of this strategy is that their customers get the feeling of being part of a community. The relation between customers and brand changes from a formal to an informal. On the other this strategy is really time consuming. In contrast to L’Oréal Professionnel they use Facebook for firm informedeness.
What do you think is the best strategy?
If L’Oréal chooses to make use of social media in spite of knowing that there is a greater risk of effecting the brand image then they might as well communicate directly with the consumers. Why would they do that? Well think of a cost-benefit analysis. First let us think of the costs: Costs could be a miscommunication with the consumer thus effecting the brand image. Benefits: by DTC marketing (Direct to consumer) they can make the consumer feel that they matter. This also effects the brand image but positively of course. If the benefits can be maximized and the costs minimized through great communication with the consumers and even great social media strategies than my advise would be to be actively in touch with the consumers instead of only throwing advertisements at them (which will make them block you).