Background of Lux:
Lux is a global luxury beauty soap brand developed by Unilever. They offer a range of personal care products including beauty soaps, shampoos, conditioners and shower gels. Since 1925, Lux has been bringing the best of beauty to women. These products are known as the beauty secret of some of the most glamorous stars – from Elizabeth Taylor, Audrey Hepburn, and Marilyn Monroe, to Ashwarya Rai, Katrina Kaif and Shu Qi. Lux believes that beauty does not have to be about hard work, but rather, about pleasure. They aim to provide an exceptional experience in and out of the shower with their unique products, infused with fine fragrances, and crafted by the world’s best perfume experts. Lux does everything to make customers feel good, look good and exceed customer expectations. Lux’s key markets currently are Indonesia, Brazil, China, India and the USA.
Why did we choose Lux?
Lux has been a leading and renowned beauty brand since its beginning. Pioneers in beauty and soap – they have had a strong market share from the very start. However, with the rapidly changing business landscape as well as the fast evolving demographics, there is no guarantee that they will continue to be just as successful in the future.
The economy today has reformed such that e-commerce has emerged as the most influential sales platform. With countless brands and products from all over the world competing with one another, consumers are spoilt for choice. In addition, social media plays an important role as an influencer of these choices. Yet, Lux has been inactive on social media and has very little engagement with customers. This is especially true when compared to competitors such as Dove, which regularly uses effective and engaging social media strategies to keep their customers loyal and involved.
Another, much more important, reason we’ve chosen Lux is because we feel that the brand has become very outdated. With all their marketing and advertising money being spent on showing flawlessly beautiful women using Lux – our group feels that they are completely missing the mark on what is actually relevant and important to their target market. Women nowadays care much less about being flawless and beautiful, and much more about embracing their imperfections, and being bold, strong and beautiful. They do not believe that good looks are the only thing to women – because they, as women, are accomplishing so much more. Thus, how can they relate to a brand that doesn’t even understand them?
This is very evident in the US market – where Lux has been continually losing market share for the past several years. Thus, while Lux may be doing fairly well in the developing markets for now, we feel that as the women in these markets evolve and grow – as they become more and more empowered like in the US – the less they will connect with and buy Lux products. Hence, it is essential for Lux to rebrand their image now in order to keep up with the modern age, and to ensure future success.
That is why we’ve chosen Lux – to help them to rebrand their image using effective, useful, and engaging social media strategies across various platforms.
Current Social Media:
Lux has a very limited social media presence, they have over 6 million followers on Facebook, however they have been inactive on that platform for over a year. In comparison, their competitor Dove posts on their Facebook page regularly, and it has over 27 million likes.
Lux also has a YouTube account with over 6800 subscribers. It used to be an active platform in 2015, although they have not uploaded a video in over 6 months. Their most viewed video has over 1.3 million views, but most average around 1000 views. Their videos are very global, in different languages and different locations.
Project Goals:
Short term goals:
- Rebrand the Lux image by associating it with empowerment of young millennial women with relevant and effective social media strategies
- Showcase Lux as the one amazing and sensuous product that all these beautiful, bold and powerful women use to relax and unwind at the end of a hectic day – to be recharged and refreshed to take on the world
Long term goals:
- Reposition Lux to remain competitive by rebranding their image so that Lux becomes THE brand for the strong, modern woman of today
- Maintain good market positions in the key markets now as well as in the future
Methods:
Lux focuses exclusively on women, and with our target to rebrand their image, the target audience will be a younger group of women – millennial women between 18-34 years of age – because these women are the future change makers in all the key markets.
We will conduct focus groups and surveys of women within this age bracket to evaluate and analyse suggested social media re-branding options for the company. We will also utilise social analytical tools, such as Socialbakers, in order to see how people are currently responding to the brand and how they are interacting with it online.
Feasible media platforms will be those that are best to convey our messages to our target audience, meaning that the platforms most used and interacted with by 18-34 year old women will be sufficient. These will primarily include: Instagram, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, as studies have shown that in the US, these platforms are primarily used by women.
Effectiveness will come through user numbers and interaction – Facebook analytics from our target audience. For example, how many women talk about this subject on a daily basis. We will also compare the statistics for those women in a developing country versus those in a developed country, as the use of platforms may differ.
Conclusion:
With the suggested social media strategies from our presentation and report, Lux can expect to cement their position in the luxury beauty soap market for a long time to come.
#HouseOfLux
Prepared by: Su Tsu Ting, Syeda Mahera Masuda, Louis Francis Christian Morgan
Marketing communication 