Please, tell us about yourself.

Hello. I am Lee Eun Young from the Laneige Marketing Communications Team. I first began my career at an advertising agency and took on a marketing communications job at Amorepacific in 2008. I managed marketing communications for premium brands including IOPE, Mamonde, and HANYUL. Currently, I am leading the marketing communications for Laneige.

The latest brand video from Laneige - the ‘Dark Farm’ has recently passed 3.5 million views.
What is story the about?

The new ad is set in a fictional world to dramatically highlight the benefits of Laneige Radian-C Cream. It tells the story of what's happening on dark spots on your skin – an imagined farm community where 'dullness fruits' (or dark spots) are grown – and a 'tragedy' that befalls. For this movie-like storytelling of this brand video, we worked with the Dolphiners Films, who are recognized in Korea for creating a new genre in the advertising field.
The Radian-C Cream is celebrating its third anniversary since its launch. We wanted to communicate the product's efficacy in new, creative content completely different from the old, traditional beauty ads. We wanted to something that the customers would enjoy watching and spread words by themselves, something that breaks away from the beauty advertising cliché.
Since its release in the first week of January, over 3.5 million people worldwide have watched it on YouTube. It is doing incredibly well, breaking all kinds of Laneige content records, including views, likes, and comments. Even though it lasts over six minutes, many viewers watch it through to the end. And that's very encouraging.

Laneige launched many collaboration projects last year, including the one with BTS.
Can you tell us what the brand’s strategy is behind all these collaborations and limited editions?

These days, collaborations between different brands are not rare occurrences. Customers value the experience that brands provide just as much as the product's actual use. They choose brands that represent their lifestyle and willingly endorse them on social media.
That's why Laneige creates appealing content and products worth collecting through collaborations with many brands that customers favor. We can provide a new brand experience and something that gets customers talking about the brand. Last year, we had three big collaboration projects. During the first half of the year, we launched NEO Cushion X Samsung Galaxy Buds; then we had a NEO Cushion X Maison Kitsune, one of the most trending fashion brands, in the second half. And late last year, we presented a limited edition of our global bestselling Lip Sleeping Mask in collaboration with international superstars BTS, which also drew much attention from customers all around the world.
We care most about the content and channel from a marketing communications perspective when we do a collaboration project. It is essential to develop content that beautifully blends the identity of two distinct brands and, at the same time, brings out the beauty of the collaboration. For the NEO Cushion X Samsung Galaxy Buds project, for example, we developed content through which NEO Cushion was presented more like a technology device; and then for NEO Cushion X Maison Kitsune, as a fashion item in collaboration with Maison Kitsune.
The channels through which we deliver our content are important as well. We make sure it is in line with the nature of the collaboration project. For example, we mostly used fashion-related Instagram channels (including @hypebeastkr, @fashionandstyle.official, and @eyemag) when we collaborated with Maison Kitsune and the collaboration project with BTS, we developed content based on TikTok and Twitter, which are most widely used among K-Pop fans.
As I said, our customers very much loved all three projects, and we sold out the products earlier than expected. What's more meaningful to us was that we had a tremendous amount of buzz around Laneige on social media through these collaborations. We were also able to draw in our partners' customers and turn them into ours. With these excellent results, we are launching more collaboration projects this year again.

How did the brand marketing communication trend change after COVID-19? How do you think LANEIGE's marketing communication will evolve?

We will continue developing content targeting Millennials and Gen Z, our core customers. One of the most significant characteristics of this generation is that they enjoy sharing their likes and individuality on social media, and it shows in data. We have worked to understand their lifestyles and the activities they enjoy through big data analysis and to find how we can blend into their life. Big data analysis helps us understand their tastes and how they feel about Laneige. Based on these findings, we develop communication strategies and action plans. Sometimes, we analyze what they say about our products and develop a key campaign message and content through which we can show our products in scenes of their everyday life, and we also collaborate with influencers. We can catch the customer response to Laneige on social media through social buzz analysis, make sure customers feel heard, and thereby add a competitive edge to our content. This brings us closer to our goal of bringing new beauty experiences to customers worldwide through creative and appealing content.