The Success of Social Media Marketing—A Case Study of YSL Rouge Pur Couture Star Clash Edition Lipstick

        WANG Jin 1155088181

        As the financial report by Loreal Group in the third season of 2016 shows that the revenue of its subordinate brand—YSL has increased 40%, Jean-Paul Agon, the CEO of Loreal emphasized that YSL is highly sought-after among Chinese customers. Although YSL doesn’t have many advertisements from traditional channels in China, the major promotion channel it adopts is social media marketing.

        While in China, YSL’s main channel of marketing is through Weibo and WeChat, the outbreak of Star Clash Edition Event was triggered by an article called “叫男朋友送YSL星辰，他是什么反应” in Weibo, which initiated heated discussions among Chinese customers. In the middle of October, 2016, YSL Rouge Pur Couture Star Clash Edition was exposed heavily in Chinese social media. Social platforms including Weibo, WeChat, and QQ Zone were all swept by the Star Clash Edition. Besides, the search volume of YSL had ranked in the first place among the luxury brands during this period.

        On the one hand, the influence of KOL is one of the impetuses of this phenomenon. Many beauty bloggers firstly posted some Weibo concerning with the color test of Star Clash Edition, which drew the attention of some lipstick lovers. Afterwards there are a series of lottery of YSL lipstick in Weibo, in which all users have chance to acquire the Star Clash Edition for free if they share the Weibo content. In this case, even people who didn’t know YSL lipstick before could become interested in the lottery so that more and more people participated in the process of promotion. There were also many punsters (段子手) in Weibo displaying the chat record in WeChat to show that how moved a girlfriend would be if her boyfriend bought a YSL lipstick for her, drawing the conclusion that buying a YSL lipstick for beloved people is a demonstration of true love. This measure utilized girls’ psychology of lacking sense of security, making them urge their boyfriends to buy the lipstick for them to prove their love. Therefore, the drive force of KOL and the quick speed of information dissemination in Weibo made the topic enter the fast-flow social circles easily. A simple sharing of Weibo could create a buzz, making the product information go viral and spread like wildfire across the Internet.

        On the other hand, the spontaneous transmission of users is also a necessary impetus. YSL not only cooperated with official accounts in WeChat, but also delivered advertisements in WeChat Moments (朋友圈). After clicking the advertisements, users could get a free prize of YSL in offline counters after filling in the information of their phone numbers and other personal information. Since the number of the prize was limited, many users who acquired the prize couldn’t wait to show their gifts in social networks. In fact, the cost of these prizes is not high, but the investment could gather the information of a great number of potential customers, appealing them to step into the brand’s counters. Most importantly, many customers will be drived to conduct secondary transmission their WeChat Moments spontaneously and do free word-of-mouth promotion for the brand, so that the brand awareness and reputation will be improved during the communication process.

Reference:

http://www.chinaz.com/news/2016/1121/615494.shtml

Isentia社交媒体营销分析案例：YSL星辰霸屏事件解析

http://www.toodaylab.com/73196

“一觉醒来都是 YSL”？我们来聊聊这几年口红们是怎么一步步变成网红的

http://www.jianshu.com/p/bae858f85315

【深度解析】YSL爆刷朋友圈，营销套路太大