For every fashion, luxury, and beauty brand executive we come across who is interested in investing efforts in the digital space, here are a few commonalities behind their thoughts and motivators:
- My brand needs to generate a larger audience, grow our clientele
- My brand needs to generate more traffic through our retail doors/to our e-commerce site
- We need to be more personable
And the most important one on everybody’s lips is the return on investment for the brand. Marketers and agencies globally seem to be promising answers to these initiatives packaged into social media efforts.
Some successful examples are such as:
Diane Von Furstenberg: a campaign that allowed social media followers of the brand to garner first dibs to trunk shows and sales items via e-commerce by dispersing limited invites for loyal followers via Facebook and Twitter. You give love to Diane and she will give you perks.
COACH: a campaign that invited audiences to draw up designs for a new handbag. Through social media fans voted on their most favorite one, COACH created the winning handbag, made it available in stores which drove audiences to retail points to discover the real thing for themselves.
For premium brands such solutions are an answer, however for luxury brands the structure is more complex. First being that a good portion of luxury brands are not e-commerce optimized for direct ‘follow-and-transact‘ strategies.
Second, if you take a high net worth individual that has a discretionary spending habit of, oh let’s say $20,000, giving them personal service is going to take a lot more than just a Tweet.
Social media is a great channel for building consumer awareness for entry-level luxury consumers, Gen Y and the sort. However, at the moment social media does not offer real solutions for the serious customers of luxury brands. This is why, lately, a hot button topic is how digital can provide real customer relationship management that directly impacts a brand’s return on investment within the digital space.
Marina Rinaldi, an Italian fashion brand, is not e-commerce optimized but still wanted to cultivate personal relationships with their audience via web. A solution was built titled ‘My MR’ , a password-protected area where users are invited to create a profile that includes the store location they most frequently shop in, the color palettes they prefer and any other relevant information to personalize their profile. The user engagement strategy for Marina Rinaldi has been to pair up lifestyle content such as travel, food, art and architecture together that compliments the tone of the brand’s merchandise.
As the user navigates ‘My MR’ they are able to save lifestyle content and merchandise to their account, which can be gathered by personal shoppers from the customer’s physical store location and utilized for more personal offline relationships.
One company that takes this concept even further is HyphenLab, which builds bespoke “web-as-a-service platform” solutions for luxury brands. One of their service offerings is providing personalized clientelling and interactive customer relationship management (CRM) software.
As web and digital allow luxury brands to cast a wide net in terms of customer outreach, HyphenLab’s approach is to consult clients to localize their CRM initiatives. Their clients utilize the digital platform to give personal recommendations to select customers by giving them dedicated boutique access online. Each of the selected customers gets allocated their own personal sales staff that is always on hand to communicate the needs of the client, such as suggesting new collections, invites to special events etc. The software then collects data such as behavioral analysis, purchasing history that gives local boutiques a clear idea how to best service their customers and anticipate clients needs.
The internet is an all-access platform, and as the luxury industry is based on exclusivity, the most effective strategies are ones that utilize digital to strike the right balance.
Photo Credits: HERE the film
Written by: Agata Seidel
All articles are copy-edited by Gina Conforti
