When LDC, the private equity arm of Lloyds Banking Group, invested in St Tropez in 2006, it had a loyal customer base, but the brand was tired and the appeal dated. Today, St. Tropez is regarded as a global luxury cosmetic leader. So what are the diffeent ways that a business can transform its brand?
Establish the right management
Ensuring that a company has the right management team to match its growth strategy is critical. When I stepped in to my role it was clear that this should be my priority, while also maintaining sales momentum. In this, LDC's support was vital. The firm's core investment philospohy is to back great management teams and with their support I brought in a number of excellent industry professionals in marketing, product, sales, finance and operations. The new management team was capable of implementing my strategy for St Tropez of taking it from a generic product to a premium beauty concept and expanding the brand.
Harness the potential of your brand
Given that the management restructuring was going to take some time and that feedback from customers had been that St Tropez's image was dated, I wanted to quickly show the market that our brand was changing. I decided we should update the brand and the packaging to match the vision for the company. It is a key marketing principle and one of the critical factors behind our success.
Creating a new cachet for the brand was complex. I did not want to completely reject what we had, so instead of introducing a radical new image we evolved the existing iconic visuals. We used a leading fashion photographer to re-shoot the advertising and imagery to create a new image and identity that is aligned with high fashion, pop culture and luxury cosmetics. This was completley in line with the strategy of moving the brand to the premium fashionable end of the market.
Many companies do alter, update and change their brand but a mistake many make is not to follow through with this completely. Again, as well as making the imagery more contemporary and stylish, we enhanced our point of sale image with branded mini boutiques in key retail outlets that distinguished us from other products. We associated our brand with the right people and using the product promoted St Tropez as high fashion rather than high-street.
Consolidate your distribution channels
Having refreshed and revived the brand design and concept, the next step was to thoroughly review St Tropez's many distribution channels. I think this should be, for any business owner, an exercise to be done at regular intervals. Assesing the performance of your various distribution channels will quickly reveal where your product is failing and give insights into why.
Get the product right
Finally, you have to find innovative ways to overcome the challenges presented by your product. One of the most groundbreaking changes we made was to secure Aromogard technology in our tanning products which solved the ‘smell' associated with self-tan. This instantly gained us ground as market leader rather than follower. For the St Tropez business the major challenge was its seasonal nature. In order to turn the product into an all year round bestseller and not just a summer affair, we created new products including a cosmetic line and a Christmas range for Boots. By staggering product launches throughout the year and creating products that have a wider appeal, the business has better quality of earnings and can now be more easily forecast.
For more information please visit www.st-tropez.com
