Challenge

The nature of travel retail and its related channels are highly promotional and tactically driven, and do not provide any sort of differentiated brand experience from an online touchpoint perspective.

Duty-free shopping in China primarily happens through state-owned enterprises (such as China Duty Free), brands lack a direct relationship with their duty-free shoppers.

Consumer & behavioral data through these touchpoints have always proved to be a black hole, held by retailers and not shared with brands.

Poor shopping experience: the boom of travel to Hainan is resulted in heavily overcrowded physical stores. Long checkout queues, hard to consult sales staff, out-of-stock issues, etc.

Inspiration

With traffic of roughly 40,000 people per day, the duty free shops of Hainan hardly represented a substitute to the thriving tourism business that China previously enjoyed. That is why we created the Estee Lauder Social Circle in collaboration with China’s largest duty free retailer, China Duty Free.

Using a WeChat mini App, we allowed travelers to open up the Travel Retail shopping experience and products to all of their friends. When travelling to Hainan, you just had to invite your friends to shop in the Mini-App and add their desired products to your basket. Once selected, a purchase would be made routing funds from your friend, to you, to the Duty Free store.

Idea

Socialization of Travel Retail. Travel has always been a social affair for Chinese travelers, be it sharing their experiences, or buying gifts for their loved ones. The Social Circle creates a new social commerce driven travel retail business model, allowing consumers to create their own virtual travel groups & sharing their online shopping baskets with friends to expand sales beyond the physical traveler.

WIN WIN Strategic Retailer Solution to breakthrough data barrier between EL TR & CDF. A new D2C online channel for EL TR, which provides deepen brand & product engagement; driving higher conversion, basket size and traffic to CDF stores. Customized APIs allow seamless transaction integration to retailers.

Consumer Profile Modeling for deepened understanding of EL TR target audience. Ability to develop consumer profiles based on the observation of 1st party consumer data, closing the loop to help the brand better prospect & target Travel Retail consumers who are largely from lower tier cities (a long difficult battleground for large global brands).

Growth

Prospected >1.3 million Chinese travelers during initial 3 month pilot

>80% visitors coming from T3-4 cities

>70% conversion of socially invited traffic

Generated > million USD incremental GMV

Successful pilot exceed all initial targets, now expanding to additional brands under corporate portfolio.

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