Lubomira Rochet has led L’Oreal’s digital transformation since 2014, and the strategy she wrote reduces to three numbers: 20 percent of sales online, a personalized relationship, and 100 digital love brands. She treats the smallness of that list as the design rather than a simplification of it, because transformations with ten game changers or seven strategic levers leave nobody understanding anything.
The first target was set from a base that makes the ambition legible. L’Oreal took two percent of its revenue through e-commerce in 2014, committed to 20 percent by 2020, and reached 27. Rochet says any L’Oreal employee can still recite the three figures.
Key findings
- Rochet’s analysis of what the technology changed is about entry barriers rather than channels. Beauty’s incumbents were protected by research and innovation, by media budgets that bought awareness, and by distribution at scale. Digital lowered all three at once, letting a brand start from a garage with third-party vendors, grow organically through social platforms, and sell direct without decades of shelf-space relationships.
- The e-commerce bet rested on a behavior the category had assumed was impossible. Everyone believed beauty had to be touched, smelled and tried, because it is a sensorial category, and Rochet’s team read the consumer data as saying otherwise. The second bet followed the same logic toward personalized communication and marketing, not just personalized product.
- She attributes the company’s capacity for change to culture rather than strategy, and the specific claim is about framing from the top. Jean-Paul Agon never called digital a threat, a disruption or anything negative; he framed it as opportunity, new competitive advantage and personalized interaction. It was always a story of growth, including reaching consumers in tier three, four and five cities in China.
- Her generalization from that is the line most worth taking away from the conversation. The only thing that is business as usual today is transformation, and the capacity to metabolize change is what will differentiate companies in future. She compares it to the metabolism of a body: the more you do, the fitter you are, and the faster you can absorb several transformations at once.
- Asked whether she had negotiated the chief executive’s backing in advance, Rochet names two prerequisites and puts them above everything else discussed: the ability of the culture to change, and the support of the CEO. She sensed both on day one, and says the turning point is a CEO understanding that digital is not an expertise but the way business is now run.
Test locally, scale by golden rule
Rochet joined in 2014 into a global role at a company she describes as strategically concentrated but operationally decentralized. Her first thought was to wonder what she would actually do, since the power sat with the countries and the brands. Her answer was to put her ego completely aside and work through local capacity to test, because the way people shop in China is nothing like the way they shop in France.
She names the failure mode of that approach before anyone else can raise it. Lean only on local experimentation and the organization becomes a circus of test and learn and proof of concept that never scales anything. The passage from a working test to a scaled rollout is, she says, the most subtle and difficult move in a company of L’Oreal’s size.
The mechanism she built for that passage is a short list of golden rules per platform, three of them, derived from tests run with the country and brand teams rather than issued to them. Rochet is emphatic that they were never dictated from Paris. A country receiving them is receiving another country’s real-life experiment and can benefit from the collective knowledge, which is why resistance stayed low.
Each platform has its own creative code
Rochet puts the fault for early social advertising in the creative rather than the platform. A thirty-second television commercial on a feed where consumption time is two to five seconds will not register, because the content was built for a television set. Dozens of parameters were tested until the finding was concrete: miss the brand and the product in the first second of a Facebook ad and nobody remembers anything.
Each wave demands a different unit of content. Facebook was the gif moment, and TikTok moved the work from gifs to memes, asking a marketer to find a movement, a posture and a music culturally relevant enough to become one. Rochet had read the platform early, seeing ByteDance in Shanghai three or four years before and thinking it would be big, a call she says does not happen a lot.
The choice not to build a silo
In 2014 Rochet faced two organizational designs. Building a silo of hardcore deep experts is the fast route, because those people understand each other and know what they are doing, but she draws a line between digital delivery and transformation. Getting good at digital with good digital people is not the same as transforming everyone else, so she embedded digital inside every function instead.
The immediate cost was that everybody hated her. The digital people no longer felt extraordinary once they reported into the business, and marketing and commercial leaders did not know what the new arrivals did or why their jobs were so different. The sales objection was blunt: e-commerce accounted for two percent of revenue, so why bother.
Rochet stands by the choice because the upskilling runs in both directions. The digital people upskill the marketers, and the marketers upskill the digital people in the beauty business. That interdependence is the point, and it is why she calls the embedded model the best long-term way to transform even though it creates an instant problem.
The person whose job is translation
Asked how she resolved that friction, Rochet’s first answer is a role rather than an intervention. She jokes that when her mother asks what she does for a living the reply is PowerPoints and translation. Then she defends the second half seriously: someone has to translate between digital people and business people, and an organization should give that job to a named person. Her early meetings about tagging and cookies were, she says, tough ones.
The purpose of the translation is to simplify the words until everyone is at ease, so that the company builds a culture of commonality rather than a culture of estrangement. Her second answer is posture. Arriving as the representative of the modern world addressing colleagues from the ancient one antagonizes people who have delivered growth for 110 years and who know the business far better than she does.
What she offers instead is an explicit exchange: you skilled me on beauty, I skilled you on digital, and there is a deal and an interdependence in that. Her third lever is agenda setting, which she concedes can look like a detail and is not. She pushed until digital transformation became the second item at every country visit Jean-Paul Agon made, after the country manager’s corporate presentation, for two hours.
The desire phase, engineered
Rochet works through the ADKAR change model on air and locates where the effort actually goes, which is 80 percent into knowledge and ability. Awareness and desire were largely handled by the culture and the chief executive.
The hard part is status rather than skill. Telling people who have succeeded for years that they should now work differently leaves them feeling their expertise is devalued. Worse, they will be judged on something they feel naked about.
Desire, where it was needed, was manufactured out of the company’s own competitiveness. Canada was willing to test a lot of things, so its results on e-commerce, marketing and data were shown to everyone else. The reaction was that people wanted to do the same and do it better.
Knowledge was then addressed at a scale worth recording. The digital community numbered 200 people when Rochet arrived and stands at 3,500 today, built by recruiting expertise from outside. Alongside it, 52,000 colleagues were upskilled in a single year through a master class series broadcast live and weekly from the office during the pandemic.
Employees first, and the syndrome she watches for
Asked how she balances stakeholders, Rochet lists consumers, employees, communities, the planet and future generations before shareholders, and then puts employees at the head of the chain. Her reasoning is about energy rather than fairness. Employees are the energy that orients a company’s effort toward the common good, and if they feel bad, anxious, or do not believe in the purpose, that energy will not flow in the right direction.
From her sociology training she borrows exit, voice and loyalty to describe what people do when something is wrong, and the distribution is the problem: few raise their voice, many exit, and many conform. The long-term threat she names is the ABC syndrome, arrogance, bureaucracy and complacency.
Her definition of what an employee needs from a workplace sits underneath all of that. It is a place where people believe in you enough to take bets on you, and see you as a potentiality rather than as someone who did that before.
Using the same tools to be transparent
Asked whether digital also lets consumers know more about the company, Rochet points to the societal debate over beauty ingredients. That conversation was running in the open on the internet, with a lot of it happening without L’Oreal.
The response was to publish beyond the legal requirement. Product pages, rolling out but not yet everywhere, list the ingredients, which is compliance, and then explain why a challenged one such as parabens or alcohol is in a specific formula.
The question about a person who does not exist
Presented with a virtual influencer who has 45,000 engaged followers and does not exist, Rochet declines to give a clean answer. The objection she states first is that a virtual person takes away part of the humanity and part of the human interaction, and can be seen as a lie. A relationship cannot be built on a lie.
The argument on the other side is about representation rather than convenience, and she takes it seriously. A virtual figure can be easier to relate to across fragmenting communities. Some people want to be represented by people who look like them, others by people who do not. That, she says, is too personal to code into an algorithm. She has no clear-cut answer, and offers transparency and optionality as the two avenues.
An ocean of sameness, produced by her own team
The most self-critical moment comes when Rochet describes what her own optimization work had produced. Two or three years earlier her team was deep into Instagram analytics, working out what performed and writing clear guidelines and golden rules from it. She took a step back, looked at her own feed, and found herself swimming in an ocean of sameness, which she says made her anxious.
The opposing force is tooling reaching the people who used to be the audience. TikTok gives regular people the means of a 1950s cinema producer, along with the creative tools to portray different kinds of beauty.
Rochet puts the homogenizing pressure on the traditional marketing side and the diversity on the creator side, then draws the obligation in production terms. Marketers owe less produced content, at least for part of what they make, and more authentic voices, figures, bodies and faces.
The Dallas moment
Asked whether the past seven years raised or lowered young women’s self-esteem, Rochet answers with a curve rather than a direction and flags that she has no data points. It went down first, and she says Instagram was not helping. In that period the feed read like a digitalized Vogue magazine, and everyone was again swimming in an ocean of sameness made of avocado toast and pink backgrounds.
Her comparison comes from growing up in Bulgaria, where some people had undercover access to a series like Dallas and concluded that life in the western world looked exactly that good. Instagram had its own Dallas moment, and she corrects herself mid-sentence: not a massive lie, a massive fabrication.
She expects the line to turn upward, because content on stories, reels and TikTok has become more entertaining and more self-joking. She calls it a zeitgeist of authenticity, in which people show their real lives and stupid jokes and are fine with it.
What stays the same, and the job that should end
Rochet holds that marketing’s purpose and mission are unchanged, in three parts. Marketing is the voice of the consumer inside the company; it understands consumer needs well enough to build world-class products and services; and it creates the experiences around them. Only the way it is done has moved, which is why she argues every marketer should become digital. In China, 95 percent of L’Oreal’s media investment is already digital.
Digital transformation is, in her phrase, the mother of all transformations. Behind it sits a consumer transformation in which everybody can become a creator, and social commerce reinvents door-to-door selling for a new generation. The internet, she says, horizontalizes everything.
The claim she ends on is about her own role. One day, she says, the company will not need a chief digital officer, because the job will have fulfilled its purpose of changing the way marketing is done.
Scope and limitations
This is an executive’s account of a transformation she led, recorded in 2021, and the revenue, community and training figures are her own statements rather than independently reported results. On the questions about virtual influencers and about self-esteem she says explicitly that she has neither a clear-cut answer nor data points, and the second answer is offered as a personal sense.
Source
This page summarises HGS #28: Lubomira Rochet (CDO, L’Oreal) on digital transformation and creating a culture of change, by Frank van den Driest, 2022-02-16.