OPINION: Revlon's Julia Goldin joins the CMO World Tour

A beauty brand needs to find purpose and commitment in its usage of digital media. So says Julia Goldin, Global Chief Marketing Officer at Revlon.

A citizen of the world – she grew up in Soviet Union, was educated in the US, has lived and worked in London and Japan, but is now settled in New York – the need for connectivity runs right through her life.

Facebook, LinkedIn and Skype keep her connected with family, friends and professional contacts. She confesses, however, to being more of a consumer of social media than a true content creator.

“I have had a very global life so I have made a lot of connections with people around the world, so it’s a very easy way to keep in touch and see what people are up to,” she says, adding that it’s also something that piques her professional interest. “If I’m interested in something I will go on Facebook and actually see how brands are communicating with how they are connecting with their consumer.”
Of all her digital devices, she’s most keen on her Blackberry, joking that her piano playing past makes her better with the buttons.

Goldin cites her experiences of pregnancy – she has two boys one nearly 10 and the other just one-and-a-half – as an example of how central digital has become.
When she had her first child in London she turned to books for information, second time round it was very different.

“With my one-and-a-half-year-old it was all digital, so I was constantly part of a community. On a daily basis, I was part of some community and that is what I realised how extensive digital has become in really helping to address most questions in your life. So at that particular stage in my life, on a daily basis, I could find out exactly how I was supposed to be feeling and what people are experiencing and what issues they have and what questions they have.”

This experience feeds into her vision of how digital fits into the cosmetics giant’s marketing. It’s about creating engagement but with purpose and commitment.

“When we launched our Facebook page, we didn’t just say to consumers, ‘okay, here’s the Facebook page for Revlon’. We engaged them in a dialogue and we opened up a dialogue around cancer,” she says. “The other thing that we did after the run-walk we posted pictures of our CEO with his wife and his kids with a stroller doing a walk. And we had got a lot of response and the reason is because we put a human face to the brand. I feel that is an example of commitment of purpose. Because we said, not only do we put the financial support behind this particular initiative but we actually give our personal commitment as well.”

For Revlon, digital channels also act as an educational tool, showing consumers how best to use the products either via owned content or relationships with third parties.

“[When we launched some products recently], rather than just putting loads of advertising out there into the digital world. We actually invited bloggers and had an event with Gucci Westman, our artistic director and obviously very famous in the world of make-up. She demonstrated how this mascara was going to be used and we gave them an opportunity to have a make over. The next day they had written a lot of things but it was from very credible source and so again the messages that were going out there to consumers were very purposeful.”

FC: What did you learn when you started monitoring what people say about Revlon?
JG: When I started monitoring myself, I discovered that consumers really love doing the ‘how to’. But actually there not many great tools available. So I started to go online and look: you have a lot of girls who do it themselves and some of them speed up. And some of them take three hours to do the make-up, usually we have the full three hours. Some of them speed it up and they go so fast [that] you don’t know how to get it done. But clearly there is a lot of interest.

FC: How has Revlon become part of that conversation and what part do the different social media platforms play?
JG: We have a Facebook page. We have Twitter. We just launched YouTube Channel and all of these are geared towards the same purpose, which is allowing consumers to have a much greater connection with the brand. [It’s giving them] much more information.
Probably our [great] role is to open up that community for conversation but also to give them glimpses of the things that they want to see. We do a lot of interesting events, Westman [for example] does a lot of fashion shows and we always do backstage. We give consumers an opportunity to see how they should put the make up on and what happened.
It’s an opportunity to give a lot more information about new products. Allow them to comment and we actually monitor what they say to hear back.
Our advertising uses quite a few celebrities. So, of course they are very interested to see behind the scenes of what happened, how did that shoot go? So it’s about providing content but it’s about opening up the conversation as well.
… [In that vein] when a person Tweets to Revlon, they get a live Tweet back from somebody inside Revlon and sometimes I think that person engage with that and sometimes that person doesn’t but they get a live Tweet. They have a live response, so we are constantly accommodating the number of engagements that we are going to have to make with consumers.

FC: What happens in-store is obviously crucial to a brand such as Revlon. How do you see digital changing that experience?
JG: My big wow moment was when I went to Japan in 2008. You walk into a shopping centre and there is a panel and you take your mobile phone and you put it against the key and suddenly you have a map of that whole shopping centre with every single store that is important and interesting to you personally highlighted with a special deal for you. Where the restaurant is; what you should order; where you can get vegetarian because I like vegetarian, for example; where there are big sales. So it was like your navigation guide.
Do I think that’s going to happen in the future? Absolutely, but I don’t think it’s always in the way that you think. It’s not the fact that every store is going to be covered in digital displays and there will be advertising running. It’s actually the fact that consumers will be able to find information very quickly. I think my hypothesis will be that it’s going to be a mobile revolution more than anything else and what is going to happen is that the onus is going to be on the customers, the store owners as well as brands and companies to develop that relationship.

FC: How has Revlon’s marketing organisation responded to these challenges?
JG: I don’t believe that this transformation is about having one person in the organization or the whole department in the organization responsible for digital because that’s a very silo-ed approach. This is a mindset change that needs to really happen. So one of the big things that has happened in our organisation is that people are very mindful of what’s happening out there and I’m not the only one monitoring. A lot of our product development and a lot of our inspiration in terms of trends is coming from a continuous assessment of what’s happening out there in the digital arena.
So that’s one big point. The second big point is how we plan our key activities. We’ve got a team in our organisation, which is not called the media team, it’s called the consumer engagement team and they really work on figuring out what are the absolutely right touch points, which of course includes the relationship we have with our consumers in digital.

FC: Is it about time or money?
JG: From an organisational design standpoint, digital might not necessarily be where you put a high percentage of our media investment but from a time perspective, it’s very time intensive to have those kind of relationships.

FC: Many senior marketers seem to look to their children to see how digital is developing. What have you learned about the consumers of the future from your eldest son’s digital usage?
JG: What’s interesting to me to observe, is not so much about the advertising, it’s the fact that he absorbs a lot of information. He’s able to comment on a lot of things and be interested in a lot of things. Even including cosmetics and including whatever I might be doing.
What that tells me is the new consumer growing up is going to be an extremely, extremely savvy consumer and we have to be ready for them. They are capable of absorbing a lot information and they are capable of making judgments and decisions very quickly.

FC: How do you think marketing needs to change to respond to this kind of consumer?
JG: As the new generations grow up, we also have to change to adjust to them and to connect with them in the most [relevant] way. The other thing as well is the level of involvement with messaging because what the whole digital world allows us to do as marketers is to be able to create a much faster relationship with consumers. It’s being able to provide much more credible sources of information.