This article is part of a Cause Marketing Campaign completed for Seneca College.
Cause: Fighting Violence Against Women
Client: L’Oréal

Client Profile

Founded in 1909 by a young chemist called Eugène Schueller, L’Oréal has been devoting its energy and competencies to its core business: beauty. For more than a century L’Oréal has been offering their expertise in the service of women and men worldwide, committing to a diverse beauty, and honouring their principles: integrity, respect, courage and transparency.

For L’Oréal, their mission states that beauty is both a language and a commitment, and it is also universal. By evoking the world diversity, and the richness and the complementarity of its brand portfolio, L’Oréal has been making the universalization of beauty its project, offering beauty for all.

They value to drive their business through ethics, responsibility, integrity, respect, courage and transparency, shaping their culture and reputation not only for L’Oréal but also for its employees.

Their ambition as a brand aims to:

Promote beauty for all and for each individual
Observe local beauty customs
Facilitate access to cosmetics products
Accelerate the regionalization of its expertise

Today, L’Oréal is the1st brand between the cosmetic companies in the world, and most of their more lucrative brands target mainly women, earning them $27.2 billion in beauty sales only in 2018.

L’Oréal Canada

L’Oréal Canada is headquartered in Montreal and is the leader of the cosmetics industry in the country as it is worldwide. R4 Its operations has 1,300 employees and include the manufacture, marketing, sales and distribution of its cosmetics, skincare, sun protection, hair care and hair colour products.

Through their beauty expertise, they offer Canadian consumers 35 of their prestigious and world-renowned brands, each and every one of them benefiting from the considerable investments in Research & Innovation made by the L’Oréal Group.

The L’Oréal Canada plant, also in Montreal, is specialized in the manufacture of professional hair-colour products, having produced already 164 million units that follow strict regulations of safety and quality standards, exporting nearly 92% produced to other Group subsidiaries.

In addition, in 2001, L’Oréal Canada opened a massive new distribution center with approximately 300,000 square feet, featuring one of L’Oréal’s most modern distribution centers, managing more than 835,000 orders per year.

Track Record

Cause Projects by L’Oréal

Throughout the years, L’Oréal has been supporting many causes around the world.

Supporting Women4Climate

Launched in 2017 by C40 Cities, Supporting Women4Climate is a project that connects 94 of the world’s greatest cities to take bold climate action. This initiative intends to empower and mentor women of a young generation who develop projects focusing on climate change in their home city. L’Oréal is the founding partner of this global mentoring program.

Supporting Women4Climate seeks to empower women to play a leading role in fighting climate change. Women leaders from L’Oréal’s teams are intended to play an active role in supporting future women climate leaders, by helping to strengthen their leadership capabilities.

Sustainable Sourcing Programs

Still reinforcing their commitment to sustainability, L’Oréal supports programs to lower the environmental impact of its raw materials and empower women to improve their health, wellbeing and livelihoods, Through its established sustainable sourcing programs it aims to benefit local producers in regions impacted by climate change.

Up to this date, more than 50% of the raw materials used by L’Oréal in its products are renewable,and the majority of them are made from a derivational of plants found around the world. Women also do most of the harvesting and processing of these worldly raw ingredients. However, they keep facing many climate-related challenges including water scarcity, poor soil health and desertification, and that’s where L’Oréal’s expertise and resources aspire to help them.

L’oréal Citizen Day

Since 2010, L’Oréal has been offering employees worldwide the opportunity to participate in a social engagement volunteering day in lieu of a workday. The event supports both social and environmental local organizations and NGOs.

Citizen Day it’s a day when L’Oréal employees can volunteer for a variety of initiatives such as the renovation of an organization’s premises, soup kitchen work, support for young social entrepreneurs, waste collection, or well-being workshops for disadvantaged members of the community. All those volunteer jobs come together to create a more engaged company for L’Oréal’s employees.

Cause Marketing Campaigns by L’Oréal in North America

L’Oreal has been leaning on the power of diversity since its foundation, between projects and campaigns.

Pride Month

From 2018, L’Oréal has started to support the Standards of Conduct introduced by by the United Nations to combat the discrimination faced by the LGBTI community, being one of the first world companies to do so. L’Oréal is now taking its commitment to human rights, diversity and Inclusion one step further by not only supporting LGBTI communities but also making a stand by including them in their advertising campaigns, especially during Pride month.

At a local level, L’Oréal has been supporting numerous practical projects that are trying to raise awareness among employees and to promote gender equality at the workplace.

NGO Care

In June 2019, L’Oréal has started supporting a unique convention against harassment at work, the International Labor Organization’s (ILO), the first international convention on violence and harassment in the workplace.

L’Oréal put together a group of companies to publically support the foundation of this convention, addressing the legal protection of both men and women workers worldwide from gender-based and sexual violence. This commitment has been released in a joint editorial piece published by Le Monde and is a starting point to start addressing these issues more deeply in their campaigns.

#WorthSaying

In 2016, L’Oréal has started the #WorthSaying campaign, with the intention to reflect on the kind of questions that are made to women in red carpet events. This campaign has its roots in the brand’s iconic tagline, ‘Because You’re Worth It,’ and it was a huge success.

L’Oréal’s Golden Globes Campaign urged Hollywood to talk about more than just beauty between their female peers, asking them about their projects and what’s on their mind. And although it may have started with big red carpet events, it also started the conversation in the real world, with L’Oréal’s consumers.

Ads for Men

Following L’Oréal’s engagement and support for women in the workplace, L’Oréal celebrated 2019 International Women’s Day with a special print ad dedicated to men in business leadership positions.

The print campaign called “THIS AD IS FOR MEN” and was published in Europe, with the objective to draw attention to the fact that most German companies are dominated by men. Women are only responsible for 8.6 percent of all stock listed German board meetings. The campaign also featured posters that went one step further, actually encouraging businesses to “hire more women in leadership roles”.

Cause Marketing Campaign | Client Profile and Track Record