CAREERS NEWSLETTER 2018-19
ISSUE 4 – Friday 16 November 2018 Where did the last month and our 2 week half term go? Since the last issue, Adam and Charlotte (pictured above) have sent the draft edition of the 2017-18 Wheatleyan to our designer, Mustard, and we are sure it will be an excellent read when it appears next month. Adam is one of two students who have kindly reported in this newsletter about their recent work experience.
OFFER AN EXPERIENCE TO SURVIVE AND THRIVE Molly Fleming (@mollykathleenv) wrote an excellent article for Marketing Week about L’Oréal’s reaction to a new marketing era where companies that just sell products will not be successful. L’Oréal, as it aims to become the number one beauty tech company believes services are becoming key to reaching and engaging with consumers. Marketing Officer Stephane Bérubé cited augmented reality beauty service Modiface, which L’Oréal bought in March, as an example of how product business can bring diversity into services. It uses AR to develop custom beauty apps, offering, for example, a tool that allows consumers to try out different make-up and hair products online to see how they will look. This service has driven great engagement and came off the back of one of L’Oréal’s most successful years in 2014. Bérubé explained: ‘I was in Paris and we had had a good year of growth and the share was very high. We were expecting a big thank you and congratulations from our CEO, which he did, but he also said everything were doing was wrong and we needed to change everything. I went away and realised he was right. We needed to change before it was already too late. That included how we went to market, the media mix, everything.’ Bringing experts in-house was crucial to overhauling L’Oréal, which now has nearly 3,000 digital specialists worldwide compared to 300 in 2014. ‘There is no way you can transform a company with consultants and agencies, you need to have the expertise close to you,’ said Bérubé. ‘15 years ago people were saying consumers will never buy beauty online because you need to touch and smell the product. Today that is a completely stupid thing to think.’ Now the majority of growth comes from ecommerce. And Bérubé urged marketers to integrate tech into every aspect of their thinking, arguing: ‘There is now a tech aspect to being a marketer and if you’re a marketer who has no opinion on AI and think that digital people should take care of digital things that is a big mistake.’ Despite the importance of technology, he concluded that one thing that will never change is the love of brands, which he defines as ‘loyalty beyond reason’.
ROBOTS TO CREATE TWICE AS MANY JOBS The rise of robots, machines and algorithms in the workplace will create almost twice as many jobs by the middle of the next decade as they will replace, according to the World Economic Forum. According to the WEF, about 133m jobs across the world could be created over the next 10 years, while 75m could be lost. These figures will help dispel fears that the rise of the robot economy would be a negative influence on pay, living standards and inequality. The new technologies would have the capacity to disrupt and create new ways of working. Of course the Industrial Revolution, which saw the introduction of steam power and then electricity, similarly created new jobs amid losses. The chair of the WEF said governments, businesses, educators and individual workers would need to take advantage of a rapidly closing window to create a new future of work for all. The risks of inaction were high as some company bosses were saying half of all workplace tasks could be performed by machines by 2025, with accounting, data entry and payroll services among those jobs at risk. Employees then will certainly need to ensure their skillset is as flexible and adaptable as possible.
@BablakeCareers