L’Oréal looks to have a ‘bigger purpose than selling product’ with e-mentorship programme
L’Oréal Paris’s partnership with The Prince’s Trust aims to help 10,000 young people across the UK become more confident.
L’Oréal Paris is collaborating with The Prince’s Trust to launch its ‘All Worth It’ programme, an e-mentorship initiative designed to help boost young people’s self worth.
The programme hopes to help 10,000 young people by “turning self-doubt into self-worth”. It is in response to figures released today (23 February) by The Prince’s Trust showing that one in three young people say they don’t believe in themselves, rising to 42% of young people who are not in education, employment or training.
L’Oréal Paris will run confidence courses quarterly at each of the 18 Prince’s Trust centres. The programme, which comprises of four modules, will address issues such as body language, communication, employability and relationships.
We felt we needed to have a bigger purpose than selling product and give back to communities.
Adrien Koskas, L’Oréal Paris UK
Learning materials to help build self-confidence will be available on The Prince’s Trust new online learning platform. The platform will also connect young people to e-mentors from companies like L’Oréal and other organisations who can provide online advice and support.
The All Worth It initiative is fronted by 15 ambassadors including Dame Helen Mirren, Cheryl Fernandez-Versini, Katie Piper, Marcus Butler and Louisa Johnson, each sharing their own stories in a series of films highlighting how they themselves have been affected by self-doubt.
“L’Oréal Paris is the number one beauty brand in the UK and the world – and we felt we needed to have a bigger purpose than selling product and give back to communities,” the brand’s UK general manager Adrien Koskas tells Marketing Week.
L’Oréal Paris is also changing its slogan ‘Because you’re worth it’ to ‘We are all worth it’ for the remainder of 2017 in a bid to reflect its focus on diversity and be more inclusive. The brand had previously used the slogan in a campaign featuring male blogger and makeup artist Gary. However, Koskas insists that its original slogan won’t ever disappear.
“’I’m worth it’ is a founding act for the L’Oréal Paris brand. We don’t want to erase that. We have changed it to ‘We’re all worth it’ in 2017 because we want to embrace diversity as a brand and talk to everyone and not just a happy few. This is something we will stick to for a longer period of time,” he explains.
“We are very serious about it, because it’s not so much about changing the slogan but [the actions] we do behind it. The partnership is going to be a three-year relationship. We are in this for the long term.”
READ MORE: L’Oréal says brands are using influencers the wrong way
To promote the initiative, the brand will be looking to its influencers and brand ambassadors to spread the news. This will be backed up by outdoor, newspaper, magazine, social and digital advertising.
He concludes: “As always, when we partner with an influencer, the message has to start with them. Everyone in this campaign is very committed to make it successful, and the campaign will start with them on social media. They are doing the talking for us. It’s important that we have a genuine commitment from them on this campaign. Once we have this genuine commitment, we can then emphasise the brand.”
Adrien Koskas will be speaking at the Diversity in Marketing & Advertising Summit, taking place on 4 and 5 April. It aims to encourage greater diversity and inclusion within leadership roles and campaigns. For more information and to purchase tickets visit https://dimalync.com/
For a while now people have grown up exposed to the repetitious themes ‘you have to continually compete with everyone around you to be noticed, to be seen, to be admired, to be successful’ and, ‘you’re not OK the way you are’, generating endless self criticisms and anxiety and offering a good or service as salvation.
With cases of mental health issues like depression and anxiety becoming more and more commonplace, and a youth culture that seems to be overly concerned with achieving external affirmation like never before, I think it’s unavoidable that we brands need to consider the picture we paint and how it might affect people.
It’s great that L’Oreal want to be part of positive change, but in an industry that is built on aesthetics, significant impact on mental health would come from shifting the images and messages of their core content to help evolve the advertising norm of imagery that causes self-doubt which features in every social space we operate in, and by its sheer mass visibility alone it has to have an impact on us.
http://www.linkedin.com/pulse/repeat-after-me-ian-dawkins
Well done L’Oréal for this work that supports young people and diversity. Now, the interesting fact would be if your senior Marketing team is made up of a ‘diverse’ group of people and not the standard monotone look, feel and background??
This patronising ‘initiative’ was blasted by Giles Coren in the Times this weekend .
Don’t put your daughter on the catwalk
giles coren
Every parent fears their child getting into drugs or crime but it could be worse: they could become a fashion model
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There are all sorts of reasons why you might want to take your child out of school for a few days. There might have been a bereavement in the family, for example, leading not only to logistical difficulties with drop-off and pick-up but a general feeling that the family should be together. Your kid might need to go to the doctor. She might have an audition for a play or a trial for a cricket team or a title to defend in an international poetry parsing, cello composition and computer-coding triathlon. Hell, my kids bunked a couple of days at the beginning of this week so we could fly back more cheaply from our half-term bucket-and-spade holiday in the sun. With the right excuse, a little hooky really isn’t frowned upon any more.
But there are some reasons for bunking that simply will not wash. And chief among these is modelling. Or ought to be.
“With a cheeky smile and her blonde locks flowing in the sea breeze, four-year-old Dylan Holiday knows how to work it for the camera,” ran a midmarket news story this week. “And now she has been rewarded for her talents, as her parents have pulled her out of primary school to model for Gucci in Milan.”
At four? Are her parents quite, quite mad? I can think of no worse moral universe to expose a reception-age (or indeed any) child to than the shallow, vacuous, narcissistic one of modelling, where intellect, articulacy and education are thrown laughingly to the wind and only surfaces are regarded. The thin and the pretty rise to the top, the interesting and original and thoughtful can go hang. Stupidity is celebrated. Dimness is all the rage. Just vomit and pull faces, luv, and you’ll go far in the most disgusting and exploitative human flesh market since the last days of ancient Rome.
I swear to God, I’d rather hear that my children were bunking school to smoke crack, have sex with strangers and set fire to tramps than to parade on a catwalk for a load of bloated Italian paedophiles and scrawny, judgmental fashion editors.
But there she is in the paper, little Dylan, striking all the awful, mendacious modelling poses we have come to know and loathe, such as the artful lean against a door jamb, one leg crossed over the other at the ankle, free hand wedged into outside jacket pocket, like nobody ever stands, ever. Not adults and certainly not four-year-olds. But who cares? There’s money in it! And of course also a future of hideous self-loathing, eating disorders, exploitation, drug abuse, chain smoking, unhappy marriage to some sadistic permatanned billionaire hedge fund manager, physical decline and rejection.
Call me sheltered, but these were the most shockingly abusive photographs I have ever seen of a child. I’m half-moved to delete them from my laptop for fear of dawn raids by the police. Call it a glib comparison, but more harm is going to come of a youth spent on the catwalk than a quick grope in the changing room from a randy Latin teacher.
Why do women do this to each other? Why do they allow modelling to exist and thrive and to suck girls in at such a young age and ruin them for ever? For all the terrible abuses wrought upon women by men, none is so harmful and ubiquitous as the evil women wreak upon their own sex by buying the clothes and reading the magazines that support the industry that engages legions of gormless underweight young women to perpetuate an unachievable human standard, to the emotional and spiritual detriment of an entire sex. That is a vast, vile and ongoing crime against all women for which middle-aged straight men — for once — have no responsibility at all. It’s just women and gays doing that to you. Not me.
A thug in a white van might shout “tits out for the lads” but he isn’t complicit in the industry that publishes millions of fresh photographs of ideal tits (and bums and arms and legs and faces) every day of the year and greedily profits from your misery that your own happen not to look like that.
And as if the sight of poor Dylan — whose mum says she “is good at taking direction in front of the camera” and “loves trying on all the clothes” — wasn’t enough to make my blood boil at the ongoing global mind-rape of the modelling industry, there was the launch of a mystifying joint campaign by L’Oréal and the Prince’s Trust on Thursday to help, “young people across the country who are struggling with self-doubt” (such pathetic, self-pitying tosh I have never heard) with a series of posters of, er, models.
Oh yeah, they are black models, and disabled models, and hijab-wearing Muslim models, and slightly fat models, and prematurely grey models and old models (Helen Mirren parading her “ancient hottie” credentials for the billionth time) but they are models. They are unattainably beautiful to a man, woman and genderqueer. The message is very simple: it is okay, in fact it is bloody marvellous and wonderful and totally right on, to be in a wheelchair, or be African, or be old or pregnant or gay or gender fluid, just as long as you have luminous skin, a big hairdo, expensive clothes and a great rack.
Who the hell do the people at L’Oréal think they are? How dim do they take us to be? A more vomitous exhibition of profit-driven virtue signalling you will never see.
With the opportunistic cynicism of Jimmy Savile claiming his set of keys to the children’s ward, the campaign announces: “L’Oréal Paris champions inclusivity and diversity because we believe everyone is worth it, whoever they are, wherever they’re from . . . ” and then shows us 15 people it deems beautiful enough to represent the company’s skin-deep antediluvian values and promote its imbecilic “worth it” catchphrase.
But all L’Oréal and the Prince’s Trust have done is subsume those other prejudices into the greatest and oldest one of all — the prejudice of beauty. You can be old, they are saying, and gay and black and Muslim and disabled and stupid and greedy and mean and illiterate and drug-raddled and depressed . . . but don’t be ugly. For God’s sake, do not be ugly. Because then we will have no use for you at all.
It is the vile truth at the heart of the modelling industry and one that I hope Dylan Holiday’s parents wake up to before it is too late: the ugliest thing of all is beauty itself.
Well, come on L’Oreal speak up!
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