Bioline is a high-end cosmetics company headquartered in Trento that sells its products to beauty salons, wellness centers and spas, which in turn use them in specialized treatments for their consumers. The company is currently undergoing a critical phase: the aim is to analyze and upgrade the omnichannel strategy, leveraging digitalization to impact on the customer experience and business performance in a positive way. To do so, the key is to optimize content management (meaning marketing, communication and sales content) that’s used for different customer touchpoints and in various stages of the customer relationship.
What steps should be taken and what decisions should be made to create and enhance the omnichannel journeys that Bioline Jatò offers its customers? How can strategic sales content management of be upgraded in the broader context of a digital transformation strategy?
The numbers:
Bioline Jatò produces and sells beauty products to professional salons with a high-end or luxury positioning. Creams, serums, and masks for skin treatments for face and body are applied using massage or customized application techniques that were specially developed by the company. More recently, Bioline Jatò has begun to sell its products directly to consumers for in-home use as well.
Bioline Jatò’s business is intrinsically based on physical experiences, which means physical channels and touchpoints are particularly critical (linking the company and its professionals, and then these professionals and end their consumers). In light of this, some years ago the company embarked on a digital transformation process for consumer relations by adding an e-commerce channel to connect directly with final consumers, for example, and by starting to offer training for skin care professionals via webinars (in addition to traditional in-person sessions).
In recent years, the touchpoints were already multiplying that the company could access for B2B and B2C interaction, so when the Covid-19 pandemic hit, the effect was simply to accelerate a strategic change that was already underway. But now Bioline Jatò needs to gain a deeper understanding what the traditional customer journey typically consists of, both for B2B clients (in other words, the owners of beauty centers and their employees) and for end consumers.
To manage the omnichannel customer experience effectively, it is especially vital to map the customer journey of the end user, who is the ultimate target for the company’s products and treatments. This makes it possible to optimize corporate strategies, including sales content management, and to support business development for B2B clients (aestheticians). The focus here is on exploiting opportunities to grow product sales for in-home use and to carve out a bigger market share.
With in-house trainers, the company offers periodic virtual workshops to distributors and to their trainers in turn. Today this training is supported by communication on social media, as well as with brochures, product catalogues, and manuals on application techniques. Although point-of-sale materials, such as posters and layouts, are still mainly paper-based, other content such as training videos and posts on social media, are already digital.
The marketing, communication and sales content developed by Bioline Jatò can be grouped into three categories:
To continue on the path to digital transformation, the aim for Bioline Jatò is to hit the reset button on strategic management of sales content as the intense digitalization process unfolds.
The case offers a problematization of the choices that had to be made at Bioline Jatò to better manage omnichannel customer relations (for different targets in various phases of the sales process). More specifically, the following are essential steps:
The Bioline Jatò case gives us food for thought on what adopting an omnichannel strategy must necessarily entail: collecting customer data, taking better decisions to make the overall customer experience more satisfying, and managing sales content appropriately to achieve corporate goals.
