Beauty's scheme-deep: L'Oreal Brandstorm 2009

MANILA, Philippines – It’s the close encounter of the alluring kind that gets to most girls. Once they’ve riffled through the pages of a glossy, passed under an imposing billboard, or strutted by a cosmetics counter, what catches their eye is an idea that looks good in their mind and is pretty hard to resist: that beauty can be bought. 

Even the most skeptical shoppers are drawn to advertisements. You survey a TVC of Christy Turlington peddling mascara with a bat of an eyelash or a print-projected Adriana Lima giving passersby lip service with a new tube of rouge, what might spring up is the assumption that, hey, maybe chicks like them are just born with it. But damned if you don’t try that shade of blush on yourself. Then again, maybe it’s all marketing.

L’oreal Means Business

That consumer-driven beauty is an inside job is the glimmering idea behind L’Oreal Brandstorm, the biggest global marketing competition, from the world’s largest cosmetics company as part of its annual Business Games. As the commander of the cosmetics realm, L’Oreal casts influence with its solid business model, excellent employment opportunities, global standards as a good corporate citizen, and overall innovative approach. Of course, the company continuously reaps influence by cultivating ideas from those with keen initiative and a fresh perspective. L’Oreal’s Business Games have been a prime source of these individuals through international challenges in various disciplines: L’Oreal Ingenius (for engineering and supply chain aspirants), L’Oreal EStrat (covering business management), L’Oreal Innovation Lab (research), and the L’Oreal Brandstorm for potential marketers. 

“The Business Games continuously aim to provide a professional experience through ‘learning by doing.’ With the long history of EStrat and the recent addition of Brandstorm in the Philippines, these games have increasingly been tapping into potential talents’ ability to discover and appreciate the beauty industry from the inside,” says L’Oreal Philippines’ general manager for human resources Tina Ampil, citing this year’s entry of Filipino participants to L’Oreal Brandstorm, apart from L’Oreal EStrat, an online business competition where undergrad and MBA students become CEOs steering a virtual cosmetics firm. 

A Grand Brandstand

With the Philippines joining 40 other countries in Brandstorm’s mass of marketing enthusiasts (students finishing up their last two years of undergrad or masteral study) this year, the online registration of 51 teams last year revealed how ripe and ready students were for such a competition. Like an enticing new product, this year’s focus being the creative conceptualization of a brand’s first fragrance for the number one cosmetics brand in the world, Maybelline New York, was difficult to pass up. Especially with prizes like a trip to Paris for 1st place, a trip to any local destination for 2nd placers, and a Nurture Spa getaway in Tagaytay for landing 3rd place — and that’s just for the national finals.

Of course, the team that’s able to grip interest with a unique communications campaign, collaborating with McCann Worldgroup and a high-grade packaging agency, would compete at the International Finals in Paris — and have a shot at snagging the 1st place prize of 10,000 euros and a trip to wherever. (2nd and 3rd placers win trips anywhere as well, with 5,000 euros and 3,000 euros respectively.)

Since registration began in September of last year, 51 teams were pared down to 17 in the university finals, and then to six in the national finals; its winner selected on April 17 for the international finals in June. As any marketing initiative would require, team members have become totally immersed in Maybelline and a New York state of mind. And while finalist teams hailed from top universities Ateneo de Manila, De La Salle, and the University of the Philippines, it wouldn’t be school spirit that would win out but an idea of beauty redolent with the smell of success.