As retail media budgets grew rapidly and partnership opportunities multiplied across the market, L'Oréal Benelux faced strategic fragmentation: no unified investment framework, unclear partner prioritisation, and organisational inefficiencies. The business required a comprehensive strategic roadmap to navigate this rapidly evolving landscape and position the company for sustainable growth.
I built L'Oréal's comprehensive 3-year Retail Media Strategic Roadmap, with the goal being to deliver end-to-end strategic clarity across six critical pillars:
- Market Intelligence & Future-Proofing: Analysed emerging retail media trends and quantified their near-term and long-term impact on L'Oréal's commercial strategy.
- Investment Optimisation & Budget Sourcing: Created clear funding pathways by resolving A&P vs. trade spend allocation conflicts, securing internal alignment on budget sourcing for each retail media network.
- Partner Prioritisation Framework: Implemented a 12-variable matrix evaluating opportunity size, partnership appetite, and media/data capabilities, producing tiered retailer mapping that informed resource allocation and negotiation strategy.
- Audience Data Strategy: Mapped first-party and second-party audience data implementation pathways via retailer partnerships and data clean room collaborations, and identified high-impact activation opportunities.
- Organisational Transformation: Conducted thorough structural analysis of existing workflows, identifying inefficiencies and capability gaps. Designed and implemented organisational redesign across internal teams and media agency partners, and led regular up-skilling initiatives to boost internal expertise.
- Retailer Playbooks & Test-and-Learn Agendas: Built bespoke activation playbooks for priority retailers, embedding structured test-and-learn frameworks to accelerate optimisation.
After getting approval from six C-suite stakeholders through regular meetings, the Strategic Roadmap became the operational blueprint for navigating the retail media landscape. The roadmap clarified budget sourcing mechanisms, rationalised partner investment priorities, and transformed organisational structure, letting L'Oréal pursue incremental growth opportunities while improving media effectiveness in the fastest-growing channel in paid media.