Luxury brands heavily invest in creating the perfect in-store experience. Visual merchandisers are tasked with the challenge to create an in-store experience that fits the brand, perfectly displays the collection, and reinforces the emotional connection with the brand’s customers.
The brand experience represents a large portion of luxury’s price premium and the exclusiveness of the in-store encounter is an essential part of it. Luxury consumers seek experience. In-store, all senses of the customer are triggered through highly designed visual presentations, audio, and oftentimes olfactory elements creating an engaging moment that touches customers on an emotional / intuitive level, driving them to love the brand and to purchase.
Online sales channels, however, seem to follow a trend of e-commerce best practices that we can refer to as “the supermarket approach”. Supermarkets are built to have an easy entrance, with sliding doors and carts available to start shopping as quickly as possible, a perfect, straightforward organization of product categories, a few very easy-to-follow paths, and a clever set-up to get customers quickly checked out in order for new ones to check in.
The last few years, we have been studying the power of e-commerce and creating guidelines for best practices. Effective categorization of products and optimizing a quick checkout process are trending topics, and have found their ways to agencies serving fashion brands attempting to start selling online.
However, we could argue that this vast functional approach to fashion’s e-commerce initiatives does not relate to the exclusive emotional and intuitive experience that fashion brands have cleverly factored into their offline mono-brand stores.
Whereas visual merchandising teams spend lots of time figuring out the flawless in-store experience to present the brand and its collections, we find, in contrast, extremely functional online stores with little attention paid to the brand experience, for which customers are willing to pay the premium.
Obviously, we should not forget that sales remain a primary goal of brand websites. However, it is also time to consider fostering the emotional connection between customer and brand throughout the online sales funnel instead of it being merely a useful process that facilitates the transaction.
With more people shopping online, and with some people even strictly shopping online, we cannot continue to surf on the emotions that customers have developed for a brand offline. We instead should think of ways to enable customers to also develop these feelings online throughout engaging, e-commerce driven user experiences.
A few notes to consider:
• Analyze the “motivators to buy luxury”, assess how these have been integrated within the in-store experience for your particular brand, and think of out-of-the-box ways to do this similarly online.
• Recognize that, when purchasing luxury, checkout is an awkward part of the process. Instead of looking at examples such as Amazon, think of ways to serve the customer differently while checking out to make it a less painful, and maybe even a pleasant, experience.
• Content is recognized as a key in telling the brand’s story online. Assess the available content and think of resourceful ways to merge content with transactional functionality.
• Engage your visual merchandising team in online e-commerce initiatives.
• Consider post-purchase campaigns. Many luxury consumers love to walk the busy streets with a large branded bag. It allows one to express personal identity. Could we leverage the technology and power of social networks to integrate such a post-purchase process seemingly valued by the customer?
Herewith, we present Online Visual Merchandising as the next step in online sales. Best practices are to be defined and will likely show to be brand specific, hopefully cultivating more creative differentiation between brands’ online shopping experiences and therefore increasing the fun of shopping the internet’s Avenue Montaigne.
Photo credits: Paul Burns
