L’Oréal recently launched its latest anti-aging product - "L’Oréal Mid-night Cream" on Tmall, sparking an unprecedented market response for the beauty brand, selling 100,000 units in its first day and attaining the #1 rank on Tmall’s Black Box Cream Best-seller list for 2019. An outstanding achievement for a comparatively priced anti-aging cream product in what is a highly competitive market environment.

As a leader in new product development, L’Oréal upholds the belief that innovation is the core driver of business growth, and that consumers are the inspiration for innovation. With the launch of this product, L'Oréal hopes to achieve improved sales and brand reputation with deeper and more efficient consumer collaboration and co-creation. THREE INNOVATION, a boutique under The Illuminera Group specializing in creating innovative consumer experience, has the privilege of partnering with L’Oréal and Tmall Innovation Center (TMIC) to witness and promote this new product launch event from consumer insight to consumer co-creation and finally to market, resulting in yet another successful case of consumer inspired innovation in the digital era.

Exploring the deeper needs of the consumer, inspiring them to co-create the ideal customer experience

The concept of “consumer-centric” has been promoted for years, yet few brands or marketing practitioners have truly implemented this idea effectively. Throughout this project, our team aimed to tap into the more profound needs of consumers. With this in mind, THREE INNOVATION designed a series of collaborative initiatives with L’Oreal. Target consumers were invited based on insights gathered from the TMIC data platform, while our team encouraged them to create their own ideal products based on differing qualities such as performance, texture or packaging, giving THREE INNOVATION a unique understanding of the customer’s potential pain points.

Guiding consumers to participate in product concept refinement and optimization - drawing from their own experiences

TMIC advocates building a well-rounded, flexible C2B supply chain based on real consumption data in support of services covering consumer insights, market trends, product innovation and strategy optimization. This outlook aligns with the core values and capabilities of Illuminera: customer-centricity and data-driven thinking. For this project, THREE INNOVATION teamed up with L’Oréal & TMIC to explore the user scenarios and experiences of anti-aging product customers, helping the brand refine strategic concepts and new selling points for the product, as well as optimizing its performance based on genuine customer feedback. This multi-faceted process of two-way communication with customers enabled the brand and its consumers to collaborate effectively, creating what is now an inherently customer-centric product.

Collaborating closely with TMIC to revitalize the brand-customer co-creation journey

As one of the first certified partners of TMIC, the THREE INNOVATION team, together with the brand side, familiarized the chosen consumers with the project directly and rapidly to evaluate and verify product ideas and selling points based on THREE INNOVATION’s in-depth understanding of the TMIC platform. This allowed creative ideas and selling points generated from consumer co-creations to be quickly entered into manufacturing and commercial processes, reaffirming the value generated by consumer co-creation while helping the brand achieve more direct and effective business conversion.