In China, you still mainly sell your products through department stores and spas. Why do you focus on digital technologies ?
How did you centralize your data from the various distribution channels upstream ?
Julien Chiavassa – Parallel to our physical network, our online sales in China are achieved by Tmall, the trading platform developed by the Alibaba group via Taobao (two thirds of our sales), our own Chinese Clarins website, clarins.com.cn (a quarter of our sales), and other retailers online. Our main challenge was to gather all our sales networks, making sure our system could handle all these different data. Then, everything changed with WeChat, the instant messaging application, which has become an aggregator, the essential contact point in China for anyone intending to do some brand communication, CRM, and loyalty programmes. In terms of marketing campaigns, we bank less on our website, and more on our official WeChat account. Once customers have been added to our database, we ask them to follow our official WeChat account, which provides us accurate knowledge of our recruiting platforms.
Right now, we can learn how many customers are really present on all our networks. We can also determine how often new consumers are recruited by each network – Tmall is the best performing. And today in China, we can apply the same communication cycle to every new consumer, whatever their original channel.
