Bridging the gap between brands and consumers

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Creative Xcellerators is a series from CreativeX that spotlights the innovators and changemakers moving advertising and society forward.

Yasmine Laasraoui (Director, Trends and Foresights, North America Consumer Insights, The Estée Lauder Companies), joins the call from her latest visit to her hometown in Canada. Her career began at a creative shop, then moved into the digital and buying side at IPG. She started working with The Estée Lauder Companies in this agency capacity before she moved in-house.  

For Yasmine, success in the consumer insights space is built on a natural curiosity. “It’s a lot about asking why, why, why? My parents raised me to question everything, so that was always part of me.” 

Wearing many hats is a prerequisite for the modern marketer, and Yasmine is no exception. Her previous experience in both creative and digital marketing is evident in her current role at The Estee Lauder Companies, where she bridges several functions across the consumer journey. “Part of my role is uncovering the drivers behind what we’re seeing in the beauty and retail market.” As Director of Trends and Foresight, she works closely with brands to help them anticipate the future by understanding key drivers of change. 

Yasmine focuses on “slow culture”, longer-term shifts that change the way consumers behave. “Within those, there are quicker moving trends, but you need to be able to balance both the long and short to be relevant.” Catering to this, she’s established a social listening capability at The Estée Lauder Companies to understand more “micro, fast culture trends.” 

Yasmine’s role also focuses on the creative itself. She’s championed the use of CreativeX to objectively test media creative to ensure it’s optimized for digital platforms.

“I love leaning into creativity, but I marry that with being insights and data-led.” 

“Creative and creative testing may not be as sexy as concepting, but because there’s so much invested in creative development, understanding how an ad shows up for consumers and how they react to an ad, making changes where necessary, is critical.” 

The final aspect of her work covers specific brands which are part of the company’s portfolio including skincare to makeup to haircare. She covers a broad array of topics from creative testing to pricing optimization, and building aspirational customer targets. 

One of the key aspects of working at such a large, global organization is managing a huge array of different stakeholders across the marketing function, and Yasmine’s role is uniquely cross-functional. Consumer insights is “the cartilage of the organization”. Success relies on being able to communicate and prove out value across the board. 

For Yasmine, creative excellence consists of two key aspects. The first is developing creative that connects to the consumer in an authentic and relevant way, joining the dots between consumer need and brand or product value. “If you’re just creating content that is telling someone about the function of your product without really understanding their needs, both emotional and functional, then you’re not going to be able to cut through. It’s about building that bridge.” 

“Our team is the voice of the consumer. We partner with our brand teams, global creative teams, and global insights teams to ensure we’re surfacing the right insights about the consumer, and how we can win with them.” 

The second critical aspect is taking that creative work and ensuring it’s fit for purpose. “You can’t take a TV ad and run that on Instagram. You have to be cognizant of the way that a consumer leverages Facebook versus TikTok versus Snapchat and how you optimize the ad you’ve created to account for that difference.” 

“That’s where CreativeX is playing such a big role. It isn’t the secret sauce to awesome creative, but it ensures you’re optimizing the assets you’ve created for their intended platform.” 

The “word of the day is AI”, but for Yasmine what’s important is striking the balance between AI and human intelligence. “Today AI can help our industry extract key themes from huge data sets and summarize key points from big qualitative studies, work which in the absence of AI might take someone hours.” But, as Yasmine points out, “a takeaway is different to an insight.” 

“AI is going to be able to share the three takeaway bullet points from a piece of work, and then it’s up to us to understand the insight from those bullets and strategically marry that with what the action is for specific consumer audiences.” 

Yasmine’s mission for the next ten years? “Keep learning, especially from our consumers.”

→ See how the world's leading brands are using creative data to drive business impact:

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