MAM
BankBazaar shows fans it cares
MUMBAI: Financial marketplace, BankBazaar.com has decided to bid goodbye to the year with a special musical tribute to some of its biggest fans, thanking them for all the love and support. The BankBazaar’s Biggest Fans digital campaign celebrates some of the brand’s biggest fans on social media with personalised musical messages. The week-long activity is being executed on Facebook and Instagram.
The whole stunt was planned out to make BankBazaar fans feel special and show them that it is listening. They contacted two of their biggest fans on social media and requested one of them to meet at The Teal Door Cafe, Indira Nagar, and the other at Blossoms Bookstore, Church Street, under the ruse of a gift to thank them for being with the brand all year.
https://www.facebook.com/bankbazaar/videos/10156018071619468/
In the meantime, BankBazaar had a band of singers and beat boxers, including Vineeth Vincent, Hannah Mathews, Joshua Selvaraj, and Sheridan Brass, to write a song for each fan. The songs were to be sung as a surprise for each fan at these two locations in a guerrilla fashion. With cameras, an ensemble of musicians and a film crew hiding in the respective locations, the fun began.
https://www.facebook.com/bankbazaar/videos/10156018047199468/
The campaign was conceptualised and executed in collaboration with Bluebot Digital.
BankBazaar.com head of brand marketing Prince Thomas says, “As an organisation, we believe in keeping our customers at the centre of everything we do, and our social media campaigns are no different. Our fans expect us to be unique and interesting in the way we tell our stories. That’s the reason we experiment with themes and delivery to put our message across. 2017 has been an extremely successful year for BankBazaar, with several well-received campaigns that made a mark on social media as well as in our fans’ hearts. So we wanted to celebrate our successes with some of our biggest social media fans who made our successes possible, and what could be better than musical tributes to such special fans!”
BlueBot Digital CEO and CCO Carl Savio adds, “Social media fans and followers are often taken for granted and treated like a statistic by some brands. For the latest BankBazaar campaign, we decided to show our fans how far we are from treating them the same way. So, we dug through social media data to find individuals who have genuinely given the brand love and support on multiple occasions and decided to surprise them using the gift of song! What followed was a crazy shoot, awestruck fans and much more! Happy to have a client as forward thinking as BankBazaar.”
Brands
Estée Lauder to shed 10,000 jobs as new boss bets on digital shift
The cosmetics giant raises its profit outlook but stays silent on a possible merger with Spain’s Puig, as job cuts deepen and a three-year sales slump weighs on the turnaround
NEW YORK: Stéphane de La Faverie is not done cutting. Estée Lauder announced on Friday that it plans to eliminate as many as 3,000 additional jobs, taking its total redundancy programme to as many as 10,000 roles, up from a previous target of 7,000 announced a year ago. The company, which owns La Mer, The Ordinary, Tom Ford, and Aveda, employs roughly 57,000 people worldwide. The mathematics of what is now being contemplated is stark.
The fresh round of cuts is expected to generate a further $200 million in savings, bringing the total annual savings from the programme to as much as $1.2 billion before taxes. That money, De La Faverie has made clear, will be ploughed back into the turnaround.
A CEO in a hurry
De La Faverie, who took the helm in January 2025, inherited a company that had endured three consecutive years of annual sales declines. His response has been to move fast and cut deep. A significant portion of the latest redundancies reflects his push to reduce headcount at US department stores, long a cornerstone of Estée Lauder’s distribution model but now a channel in structural decline. In their place, he is accelerating the shift toward faster-growing online platforms, including Amazon.com and TikTok Shop, a pivot that is reshaping not just where Estée Lauder sells but how it thinks about its customers.
The numbers are moving in the right direction
Despite the pain, there are signs the medicine is working. Estée Lauder raised its profit outlook for the remainder of the fiscal year, guiding for adjusted earnings per share in the range of $2.35 to $2.45, above analyst estimates and a notable step up from the $2.05 to $2.25 range it had guided for in February. Organic net sales growth is expected to come in at 3 per cent, the company said, at the high end of the range it set out in February.
The share price tells a mixed story. After De La Faverie took charge, the stock surged nearly 60 per cent, buoyed by investor optimism that a longtime company insider could finally arrest the decline. But 2026 has been rougher: the shares have fallen 27 per cent this year, weighed down by disappointing February results and the overhang of unresolved merger talks with Spanish beauty giant Puig Brands SA. The company gave no additional details about those discussions on Friday, leaving the market to guess.
Silence on Puig
The proposed tie-up with Puig remains the most consequential unknown hanging over Estée Lauder. A deal with the Barcelona-based group, which owns brands including Carolina Herrera and Rabanne, would reshape the global luxury beauty landscape. But with nothing new to say and a turnaround still very much in progress, De La Faverie is asking investors to trust the process.
Three years of sales declines, 10,000 job cuts, and a merger that may or may not happen. At Estée Lauder, the overhaul has barely started.
