Alexandra Operto (BBA 2010): a career path in marketing & communications powered by social media

Alexandra Operto (EDHEC International BBA 2010) started her career in social media. Facebook was born during her student years, the Twitter boom began during her first job, Instagram appeared from nowhere as brands were beginning to put together community management strategies, just like TikTok a few years later. Here she tells us about her career, what she has learned and her daily life with Estée Lauder Companies in Sydney.

How would you sum up your position and current responsibilities? 

I’m marketing & communications director for the Estée Lauder and Tom Ford brands at Estée Lauder Companies in Australia. I’m responsible for building marketing strategy and the launch of products developed by the international head office in New York for the Australian subsidiary. This includes brand positioning, product distribution, sales channels, pricing strategy, negotiations with retailers, as well as coordinating my staff teams on in-store merchandising, CRM, media campaigns and influencers, etc. We develop a lot of local content with the aim of reaching out to local consumers, thereby generating sales and gaining market shares by creating an omni-channel consumer journey that is consistent with the brand’s values and image.

Did the international mobility dimension steer you towards Estée Lauder? 

The number of brands was the primary motivating factor. I worked in an agency for 4 years before joining Estée Lauder in France, and I used to really enjoy looking after several brands with different sets of problems, being able to switch from one world to the next. The firm’s global presence also allows me to work on different objectives. In France, Estée Lauder is a challenger, the brand is trying to recruit new consumers. In Australia it is the market leader.

Why choose Australia in particular? 

I came to Australia on holidays to see a friend from EDHEC. At the time, I had been in Paris for 8 years and felt I needed to do something new, but I didn’t know what and couldn’t choose between a trip abroad or a Master’s. The HR dept. at Estée Lauder advised me to develop my experience and, if opportunities arose, to head overseas with the firm. This position in Sydney popped up at just the right time as it was the ideal stepping stone from my position in France but with the same brand. I had the support of my contacts at Estée Lauder Corporate (global) in New York, and so the whole internal network at Estée Lauder combined with my desire to head abroad steered me towards Australia. That kind of move can be intimidating, but it’s very stimulating!

How would you define perceptions of the Estée Lauder brand in Australia? 

Well you have what’s called the “Anglo market” culture, which it shares with the United States and the United Kingdom. In France, consumers are more likely to turn to French brands like L’Oréal, Lancôme, Chanel or Dior. And so Estée Lauder is not very well known among French consumers. Here the brand is really appreciated by consumers and Estée Lauder’s career path is widely studied.

What sets Estée Lauder (1908–2004) apart from other company founders? 

She’s the one who started offering customers “gifts with purchase”, as well as samples, which are now an integral part of all marketing strategies in cosmetics. She was also a pioneer in customer relations, what we now refer to as CRM. She used to visit hair salons and show her products to women while they were waiting. She launched the brand with just 4 core beauty care products. She went on to launch perfumed oils to be added to bath water, which she promoted by directly targeting women in the hope that they would buy them for themselves, rather than receiving them as a gift from a man. She took huge risks in her career and always had a very close relationship with her in-store sales staff. Commercial nous was of key importance to her, so much so that she continued to visit her stores regularly until the 2000s.

How did you build up your experience and training in social media? 

I did my final-year internship at Orange Business, its B2B unit. At the time, they had expert blogs on the Cloud and information systems. The firm’s experts used to write articles, and my role was to coordinate their publications on the blog. It was an editorial role more than social media as such. Starting out in 2009, I didn’t know Twitter and using social media was still very much for geeks. It was a tight circle, and businesses felt it was above all about managing after-sales services. The business communication dimension and the idea of maintaining community dynamics weren’t in place yet. And so I learned little by little. When I moved to communication and partnerships at Orange, I looked after communications about the Tour de France and Euro 2012. That expanded our audience. We realised the power we had being able to create a community, whether positive or negative. It’s very interesting to develop your experience in that area, and it has helped me a lot throughout my career. When I arrived at Estée Lauder, few people had any experience of community management or developing communication strategies on social media.

By inviting consumers to take part, social media added a pull dimension to marketing, which had traditionally been based on a push strategy ...

Social media became exchange platforms where you could attract suggestions. One of the first things I suggested at Orange was to ask those who followed us if they wanted us to talk about a particular topic. At the time, artificial intelligence was emerging; I spoke about it to our various bloggers to see if any of them were passionate about it. The community is always happy when you involve them, it brings people together. Nowadays we add QR codes to our print advertising in magazines like Vogue so people can add us to their WhatsApp account, talk to us and take part in live chats with customer advisors. You have to create communication channels and privileged links with your customers, and not only “push” information on them. Online ratings and product feedback have also changed the stakes. We have data that shows us the conversion rates for a product page on our website with good ratings and a certain number of posted opinions, compared to a page that has few or none.

You’ve built up your career alongside the emergence and evolution of social media by putting into practice what you learned as you went along. Nowadays, do people still have time to get a handle on social media in professional environments?

Social media has always been about practice. You test something, and if it doesn’t work it doesn’t matter, you adjust and start again. A lot of brands have hesitated to invest in social media. When I was working in an agency, from 2012 to 2016, Instagram was still starting out and the big brands wanted long-term editorial schedules. We explained to them that they couldn’t predict trends 3 months in advance. Live make-up removals? ASMR (NDLR: Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, a practical video designed to produce discreet noises that enhance the well-being of viewers)? Anything is possible! The emergence of independent communities on social media has also been a source of information for us. For example, in one group dedicated to beauty care run by passionate non-professionals, we saw an increase in the number of questions about one of our foundations: “I don’t know how to apply it”, “do I need tweezers?”, “do I need a blender?”, “do you have any advice on making it thinner?”. And so we replied with a series of videos on our social media platforms. That’s another advantage of social media: you can react to trends, learn from the consumer, and also teach them about a particular topic.

What are the current trends for brands on social media?

It’s a constant process of reinvention. There is more and more virtual selling, which involves people directly selling products in a live session on Instagram. You can also do a live session and put a product to one side that will be bought later. Customers and consumers are much more connected than ever before. Brands use social media as channels to generate engagement with the brand – “brand love” – not only as ASS channels. But you must ask what a channel brings to the brand. There is a kind of rush culture, where brands feel the need to move fast on new social media platforms. Many brands threw themselves at TikTok when it emerged, with varying levels of success. Having a presence just for the sake of it is pointless. You need to have something to say or relevant content to offer.

Have you seen other changes in marketing since you left EDHEC?

Around 6 or 7 years ago, people started talking about Growth Hackers. Now a lot of companies either have them in-house or rely on specialized firms. People used to collect data without knowing how to interpret and transform it into insights, followed by action. For some time now, we have seen the emergence of data engineers. I think you need to be willing to listen, you can learn a lot by observing. I built up my marketing skills by observing how consumers behave and looking at what I was doing myself. When I buy a washing machine, I look at online ratings. So why wouldn’t somebody buying a €150 cream do the same? Being a good marketer means having empathy for consumers. When I arrived in Australia, consumers were very concerned about the origin of ingredients and the way products were designed. We ran a campaign to increase transparency on these issues, and our product info on the website has become very detailed.

Which is the most important nowadays, the product, the message or the channels? 

A good product that doesn’t have the right message or the right channel won’t work. A product based solely on the way its marketed won’t succeed either, if there’s no substance to back it up. A product in the right channel but whose message doesn’t resonate with consumers won’t work. Once again, the most important thing really is the customer. If you have a clear objective and the right consumer and market insights, all three will flow naturally. At the very least, the message and channel will work if the product is well made and addresses a consumer need. Taken separately, none of the three will work, and they may not even work taken together.

How do you expect brand communication to evolve over the next 5 years? 

The emerging trend is peer-to-peer recommendations. Private Facebook groups dedicated to beauty care or other topics are developing. Consumers take selfies and ask others from the “real world” who have tried beauty products to give them spontaneous advice. But such tips and best practices also apply to loads of other areas! Beyond the insights you can get in these groups, you can also see what people don’t like. That allows you to create communities of “super customers” who can go on to become brand ambassadors.

CRM strategies are also developing strongly. No-one likes receiving emails without any link to what they’ve already bought or looked for. Estée Lauder creates customer journeys: when you buy a product, the first email you receive explains how to apply the foundation you’ve bought. Another email two weeks later asks you for feedback and suggests a complementary product from the same collection. An email two months later (which is how long the product lasts) invites you to repurchase the product and receive a small gift. Everything that is dynamic is really set to become essential, and brands have yet to invest sufficiently in their databases and data processing. They need to be used correctly, and above all it’s about sending out meaningful messages.