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South Korea Mobile Commerce strategy for L’Occitane

Client profile

L’Occitane, a listed French luxury retailer of body, face, hair, fragrances, and home products, shows positive growth in Korean Kakao Commerce, specifically Kakao Gift. Although having a well-established position, numerous local and global competitors have entered the market.

Objective

L’Occitane is now facing ever-growing competitive pressure in the Korean Mobile commerce market and the Kakao Gift platform. Therefore, the client has reached out to Daxue Consulting to research Korea’s mobile commerce market, assess their competitors, and provide recommendations.

Research process & methodology

As the client needed to understand both the market and the competitors simultaneously, we started with desk research focused on benchmark analysis and case studies detailed in the three steps below:

  • Macro overview of the mobile commerce landscape in South Korea
  • Benchmark analysis of the competition (international + local) through case studies in Kakao Gift
  • Conclusion of the research: Executive report with strategic recommendations

The first step was to gain a general understanding of the mobile commerce landscape in Korea. This meant conducting secondary research via Korea-centered databases, the internet, and industry reports to understand:

  • Kakao users’ typical gifting journey
  • Gifting occasions and sentiments
  • Competitive landscape.

We deep dive into L’Occitane’s top critical competitors in the Korean top beauty/cosmetic e-commerce market. Cross-comparing the following perspectives, we identified the must-have strategies for our client.

  • Profiling top beauty/cosmetic products most represented on Kakao among relevant brands
  • Success factors, key selling points and competitive edges of the top players
  • Pricing and promotion analysis

The main objective is to clearly understand competitors’ best practices on Kakao Talk and how L’Occitane can maintain its competitive edge. Some of the strategic deliverables we investigated were:

  • Cross-correlate all competitors’ findings and identify gaps & opportunities in line with L’Occitane’s situation in Kakao Gift
  • Comprehensive conclusion of top product categories, SKUs, key effects/ingredients, and packaging to be considered by L’Occitane
  • Synthesized recommendation on must-have and nice-to-have retail pricing and mark-up promotions that is the most suitable for L’Occitane

Outcome

We presented our findings along with actionable recommendations to the client via an executive market report, and the client implemented our recommendations and maintained its leading position on Kakao Gift.