L'Oreal Group’s Subsidiary Company Kerastase Failed Customers During the 618 Shopping Festival
- Chaileedo Press
- Jun 28, 2022
- 3 min read
During the last year’s Double Eleven Shopping Festival, L'Oréal met tens of thousands of complaints and even several times ranked among the most searched hashtags on Weibo (China’s Twitter-like platform) because its facial mask has a price problem. This time in the 618 Shopping Festival, another brand under L'Oréal Group named Kerastase also suffered many consumer complaints.
This year’s 618 Shopping Festival, known as the hardest ever, has finished already. According to the list of great promotions released by data analysis platforms, Kerastase scored a prominent place for its market performance in this mid-year Tmall Festival. By the Tmall store sales ranking list of this period, Kerastase’s official flagship store ranked second place in the personal care category, and first place among the hair care brands.
However, CHAILEEDO has noticed that recently there are several consumers complained about Kerastase for its discount problem happened this period. One of the consumers stated that on the first day of the Tmall 618 Shopping Festival, May 26th China standard time (the dates in this article are all based on this standard), she saw that Tmall Kerastase's official flagship store showed it was available to use the 70 yuan off coupon once the purchase price rose to 900 yuan, so she chose two products named Kerastase Fairy Hair Essential Oil and Ginger Cleansing Shampoo Pink Bottle and paid the total 100 yuan for the down payment. When it came to May 30, this consumer found out that the previous coupon was not available anymore. Consequently, when the final payment day came on May 31, she has to pay extra 70 yuan.
CHAILEEDO found out that in Tmall Complaint, China’s complaint platform, there are many consumers accusing, “Kerastase false advertised for the availability of 70 yuan off coupon, frauding consumers by canceling this coupon’s using permission after they have paid the down payment”, or “Taobao/Tmall Kerastase official flagship store cheated consumers to pay down payment for this discount activity, but announced it didn’t partake into on the following day”.
On other social platforms in China such as Xiaohongshu and Weibo, there are also quite a lot of people complaining about Kerastase’s cancellation of 900 minus 70 coupons without noticing the public. Some netizens said, “the Hair Essential Oil and Ginger Shampoo were originally in the discount activity. The company must get them canceled later because there were too many orders”, or “Kerastase was totally cheating the consumer. I will never buy it again”.
Regarding this, CHAILEEDO has consulted the customer service of Kerastase’s official flagship store. “This activity belongs to Tmall Platform, which Kerastase store has not participated,” they answered. In other screenshots from our net friends, the CHAILEEDO customer service has offered almost the same answer, and they added, “please consult the Tmall customer service for the coupon issue”.
However, when CHAILEEDO asked how Tmall customer service handled this problem, they didn’t answer it directly. Instead, they only said, “We are so sorry for your inconvenience.” There are also some Chinese consumers who expressed grievance for this kind of responding attitude, “customer services were shirking the responsibility, they were ill-mannered.”
On June 23, CHAILEEDO observed from the Tmall Kerastase official flagship store and found that the two products involved in the event, Fairy Hair Essential Oil, and Ginger Shampoo Pink Bottle, were among the top two products sold by the flagship store with the respective monthly sales over 80,000 and 30,000.
Commenting on the coupon canceled issue, one consumer said, “There were tens of thousands of people ordered these two products during the 618 Shopping Festival, which means a quite large number of customers were deceived 70 yuan per person by Kerastase. They should be responsible for this.” According to the data from O&O Consulting, Kerastase has ranked fourth among the online retail sales of shampoo and hair care brands across China, accounting for 4.2% of the retail sales, with a year-on-year growth of 60.4%. It is also the brand growing fastest in retail sales compared with other top ten ones on this list.
Fabrice Megarbane, L'Oréal Group’s president of North Asia and its CEO of China, had publicly remarked that China has become Kerastase’s largest market across the world.
This shows self-evidently the significance of China’s market for Kerastase. CHAILEEDO noticed that despite a lot of consumers reflecting the coupon issue on China’s large Internet platforms, Kerastase officials didn’t respond to this issue to the public. Besides that, CHAILEEDO also called L'Oréal’s online customer service experience center for this matter. They responded that they will feedback on this but still suggest consumers communicate directly with the brand's customer service.
Comentarios