It’s no secret that fashion and luxury brands have been a bit late to join the social media party. The exclusive nature of luxury presents a significant challenge when faced with establishing a presence within the transparent, immediate and viral platform of social media.
As we see more and more leading luxury brands place a stake in the figurative ground that is the social media landscape, there are some recognizable successes and failures. Social media is a learning curve in many ways, and the nature of the internet is such that there are constant evolutions giving way to new platforms and changes in interaction, all of which affect how brands communicate and utilize the digital space.
Trial and error has become a component to digital brand marketing, and the immediacy of the internet lends itself well to being a testing ground for marketers to gauge the potential success or failure of a campaign before committing significant resources to it.
While brands across industries, luxury and otherwise, are challenged by either the lack of a digital department or a newly appointed one, for luxury brands the challenge is even greater because the digital team needs to understand both the luxury brand mentality as well as have a firm grasp on all things digital. For a luxury brand, a misstep on social media can negatively affect the consumer’s perception of the brand, sometimes more so than mass-market brands.
Because digital (and social media) present such new opportunities, they often require more strategy and follow-through compared to traditional advertising. The pay-off, however, is the ability to participate in an innovative platform, reach a significantly larger audience, track metrics, and save budget dollars.
At Fashion’s Collective we have a firm grasp on the digital platform, as well as on what it means to be a luxury brand, marketer and consumer. As such, we have outlined several high level guidelines for luxury brands to ask themselves when crafting a social media campaign:
1. How do current customers perceive the brand? How do the current customers interact online outside of the brand?
2. Is the brand campaign focusing on the social media platforms that are the most used by the target audience?
3. Does the campaign concept provide value to: first, the consumer, and second, the brand, in a way the brand feels comfortable with? (If the campaign is too self-serving, there is a good chance it will not be received well, and negative sentiment travels fast online).
4. What are the metrics of success?
5. How will the success of this campaign be leveraged for future initiatives? (Is a database being established or grown, is the idea one that can lead to complimentary future campaigns, are there loyalty program tie-ins?)
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Photo Credits: Marcel S. Pawlowski
