In the last
few years, living in Italy, one of the leading countries in fashion design,
I've been, more than once, assigned the task to help important Luxury brands
start adopting new medias in their marketing campaigns.
Luxury brands were in fact, until recently, divided by a constantly widening gap from their mainstream brand sites counterparts.
Responsive designs, social media marketing strategies and search engine optimization are all digital assets challenged to provide a truly “white glove” online experience.
The sensorial experience of a luxury lifestyle that these brands could achieve in human-to-human interactions is now finally made possible also online with outstanding special customer service and the care and careful attention to detail that luxury brands need to exhibit.
The following bullet points are all online augmentations that luxury brands need to embrace to fully mirror their offline experience and highlight high standards that their customers have learned to expect.
User Experience
Online content must enhance the users shopping experience. Attention to detail, smooth product catalogue browsing, rich visuals and elaborated stories usually enriched by celebrities, give luxury brands a powerful advantage to enhance the user experience.
Dior offers
a great example of this.
An online magazine(or blog) involves
even more likely customers, encouraging them to visit regularly not only to
shop, but to also engage with the brand through behind the scenes and updates.
Design
Impeccable aesthetics do half the job of creating a unique experience. Burberry online resembles perfectly the in-store emotions with beautiful scenery and a carefully designed interface.
Customer service
One of the most difficult tasks is creating an exceptional customer service that make users feel as if they had subscribed to a fully featured concierge service. Luxury brand customers are more likely to contact someone if they have a question about a product or need to discuss an issue. Both Loyalty and brand affinity derive from this. Brands as Bally raise the bar, offering a fully featured customer service.
Social Media Marketing
Many luxury brands and retailers created their own hashtags and sharable content for fans to share with their peers. The most effective campaigns were those that engaged followers in a conversation about the brand.
Louis Vuitton’s twitter love poems campaign is a great example of social media marketing done right. Items in the women’s Mini Mon Amour and men’s Gallant Love collections conversed via Twitter by writing mini love poems to each other. Louis Vuitton used hashtags #MiniMonAmour, #GallantLove and #LVLove and linked to the respective commerce-enabled accessories sections of its Web site.
Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Vimeo, The Fancy, Tumblr, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google+, offer all huge gateways for new customers to get in touch with the brands and find affinity with them.
This generation is moving fast, as we struggle to adapt to new technologies luxury brands need to adapt too to our new consumption habits. And the time has never been more right than now to take fully advantage of customers new demands to enrich their shopping experience and evolve with them.