Introduction

 What do today’s women care about the most? Is it beauty? Is it to find a good looking and rich man? Is it to start a family and live happily ever after? For today’s modern woman, none of those things are in the top three. Today’s women, especially today’s millennial women (ages 18-34), care more about their financial independence, their “me time”, and having a career more than they do about any of those things. This isn’t simply conjecture, but it has been proven time and again through experiments and research studies, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1

Meanwhile, Lux’s brand messaging, marketing, and social media strategies thus far have always been about beauty and flawlessness. Whether its using Katrina Kaif, or Shu Qi, Lux consistently uses the typically beautiful, fair, flawless women to show an ideal that their target audience can aspire to. However, that is as about as relevant today as the floppy disk is to the computer. This type of messaging and strategies are falling short of what truly matters to the millennial women.

This is evident in the stagnating or declining market share in many of Lux’s key markets, as shown in Figure 2 below.

Figure 2

Thus, our team has endeavored to find out what exactly it is that Lux is missing in its social media channels and what we can do to fulfil it. We find out what today’s millennial women want, and what Lux can do with regards to its social media strategies to reach out to this target audience and occupy a space in their lives, such that Lux becomes an irreplaceable brand and product in these women’s lives.

Objective

The new objective that we defined for the Lux social media team was to rebrand the Lux social media channels (Lux website, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube accounts) with relevant and up to date content strategies in order to engage and connect with the target audience and maintain or improve market position in all of their markets. This can be broken down into three parts:

Use social media to rebrand the Lux image from an outdated one to a more relevant and up to date image

• Effectively utilize the Lux social media accounts to post relevant content that will help the brand connect with their target audience on an emotional level
• Use the new social media strategies to help Lux increase sales and maintain/improve their market position in their markets

Social Media Strategies

We have come up with three different social media strategies to each help achieve a different part of the overall objective.

The first strategy is a revamp of the website, to help address the need for a branded consolidated website community for women. Women face a lot of problems in this world, and a Nielsen study has even shown that women search for more self help tips online than men do. While there are many forums and communities, or sites like Cosmopolitan and Vogue, which might help fill this gap, they’re all very segmented and not always relevant to ordinary modern women.

Just like the PlayStation Network is an online community of gamers to connect, support, and find help online, we aim to build a Lux network through the website, where like minded women can connect, support each other, and find help for all of their life problems. If women don’t have to worry about where to find help and community support, they will have more time to spend on the things that truly matter – achieving her dreams and ambitions.

The second strategy is to help further this message and help amplify it using a consolidated social media platforms strategy to be implemented using Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. For Instagram, we no longer want Lux to post pretty, aesthetically looking pictures of Lux products or of celebrities (Figure 3), both of which serve no purpose.

Figure 3

Instead, we want the different country Lux Instagram accounts to start posting pictures of everyday women, who’ve accomplished amazing things. Much like Humans of New York does, we want to post about ordinary women who’ve done extraordinary things, in a bid to help support and inspire the target audience to do more and be more. Figure 4 is an example post form the Humans of New York page, which showcases the story of an ordinary women who has achieved so much in her life through perseverance and hard work – and this is the kind of posts that the new Lux Instagram accounts should have.

Figure 4

An added benefit of this is that these women would then become unofficial brand ambassadors for lunch, sharing the post with their social networks, further amplifying the Lux messaging and helping to reach a higher audience.

Facebook and Twitter is to be used to help further amplify the Lux messaging and to engage in conversations with our target audience. This is mainly because they’re both very effective platforms to disseminate messages to large audiences, as well as to engage and interact with the people. These two platforms can be used to share the content from the Lux Website, Instagram, and YouTube pages, thus generating more traffic for those platforms, while also covering non-social media marketing aspects of the brand.

Thirdly, we want to use the YouTube channel, and Lux advertising collateral, to change the way we talk to and about women. Instead of showing flawlessly beautiful women prancing about, or trying to attract a man, we want to show beautiful and successful women accomplishing great things. We can use real life business women, sports stars, or celebrities, but instead of just having the face, we want to show their accomplishments as well. In addition, here is where we bring in the Lux product benefits most prominently, by showing that these successful, accomplished women use Lux products in their daily regime, as part of their dedicated “me time”, in order to rest, relax, and recharge for the day.

Doing so would start showing an ideal for the rest of the target audience to work towards – something they can be inspired by, and aspire to achieve at the same time. Thus, this will help to increase their emotional connection to Lux, and increase their top-of-mind recall.

Conclusion

The benefits of employing these strategies are many fold. Firstly, there will be an increase in relevant content, which will help to drive greater engagement and interaction with our target audience.

Secondly, this will lead to an emotional connection between the brand and the target audience, which will influence increased top-of-mind recall. This is likely to increase sales in all of the key markets of Lux.

Thirdly, this will help Lux to cement their position as the market leader as it will help them to maintain or improve their market share statistics. Thus, we believe, these social media strategies, if implemented correctly, are very likely to help achieve the new objective for Lux’s social media channels.

Prepared by: Tsu Ting, Mahera and Louis