Weleda: how the company is engaging its consumer base

A new report from Positive Luxury suggests that beauty brands and retailers are seeing a rising demand for engaging both consumers and employees in new and innovative ways.

Positive Luxury, which describes itself as a platform that ‘connects luxury brands with consumers that care’, released the report entitled ‘The World is Ruled by Emotions: Breaking Tradition the Millennial Way’ via its site, and it is available here​.

Weleda is a multinational consumer goods company active in beauty and personal care. This article is part of a series of interviews with retailers and brands featured in the Positive Luxury report.

Why is the trend for better consumer engagement a focus for Weleda? How are you responding to it?​

It is always good to see consumers getting more engaged, we brands are here for our consumers. That’s our primary purpose.

Engaged consumers hold us to account and drive us to better and better performances – not only of products but also on environmental and social dimensions. The best solutions often result from dialogue with our consumers.

Digital technology has opened many new exciting opportunities for consumers to engage with brands and vice versa. It has multiplied ways of connecting and interacting. Finally, true dialogue can happen – not just a one-way 15-second TV spot.

It’s a great way to learn about them, what they hold dear, so we can adapt our offering to fulfil their needs and longings even better.

User-generated content is a great help – users often know better how to describe the products and experiences than we do.

Weleda is using social media extensively, but also tries to build offline platforms where engagement can happen. Real life experiences like massages and local events are still the best way to experience our products and the community behind them.

People across the world are always very delighted and transformed when they visit one of our biodynamic gardens across the world. Working alongside our gardeners, and seeing all the vitality of the plants and care applied to grow and transform them, is a very pure form of engagement.

Does the demand vary regionally/for different consumer groups demographics? Is it important to differentiate your offering to meet different engagement demands, and if so, how can this be done?​

While we can observe certain differences across geographical regions (culture, experiences, role of nature), there are almost as many differences within regions as between regions.

However, today’s consumers are very open-minded, and often zooming between countries – so they also expect the same products to be available everywhere and also to meet the same brand messages and values.

In the end, all consumers would like to have products that work while doing good for the planet and the society we live in. This is true in all corners of the world.

Weleda has the big asset that we have local subsidiaries with a long experience in many markets (many have been established in the 1920s/30s). Hence we can really feel the pulse of the local market and cater to this.

And we have organizations and teams that can engage on a local level. Events in Brazil do not look like the ones in Russia or Japan. Also the NGOs we work with are always very local. It ranges for instance from the Derbyshire Wildlife Trust in the UK, to Natuurmonumenten in the Netherlands, to Les Colibris in France.