I’m still not convinced.
Luxury brands are defined in part by their exclusiveness and inaccessibility; social media rebalances power and control via its inclusiveness.
I’ve been on the south coast of France and high end cars parked outside of fancy hotels attract crowds like flies to honey.
Last year, I was walking down a London side street with my CFO and we paused to admire a Maserati drive past. Ford and GM have run influencer outreach programs; Maserati does not.
A few years ago, I delivered a speech at a Google reception for luxury brands. Afterwards, I spoke with representatives from Bulgari, Cartier, and others who felt that my remarks weren’t applicable to them given the presence of brands “not like us” in the room.
Earlier, when I ran global digital marketing at PUMA I worked on co-branded presences with Philippe Starck, Neil Barrett, Christy Turlington, and Yasuhiro Mihara. At the time our comparison sites included Prada, which was forever just a single picture, and Helmut Lang, which was a list of links. Forget any usability or even worse, drive to sales.
All brands today are thinking about social. But do luxury brands need social media? Perhaps a better question is this – exactly what are luxury brands, anyway?
really liked this. you make a great point.
i’m thinking, perhaps exclusive brands need exclusive social solutions that exploit the elite concept… connections for the disconnected.
Gaurav Mishra has an interesting post on how luxury brands can use social strategies
http://www.gauravonomics.com/blog/four-powerful-strategies-for-how-luxury-brands-should-use-social-media/
Like you, I don’t think luxury brands need social media. There are a lot of brands that don’t need social media (lumber comes to mind). But I digress. I don’t believe luxury brands need it for the exact reason you said.
The fact of the matter is, a nice Facebook page, a sound Twitter strategy, or an influencer engagement initiative is not going to make Rolls-Royce, Harry Winston, or Loro Piana any more money. The difference is the line between absolute luxury, like the ones I named, and aspirational (but attainable) luxury. Brands like Audi, Tiffany, and Louis Vuitton fall into the latter category. Yes, they’re luxury, but they’re not completely out of the reach of the middle class.
When you get to the point where a company’s product website lists no prices, THAT’S when it doesn’t matter if you’re in social media. Because your customers aren’t buying your product based on a Facebook engagement. They’re buying it because they want the best. The product does the selling. And the referrals happen behind closed doors at exclusive country clubs and private cigar rooms.
The only thing social media would afford them is more aspirers, but not many serious conversion leads. And when you’re selling a $450,000 car, a $180,000 necklace, or set your website’s default language to Italian, that’s what you need.
In my own experience working with luxury brands who are confronting this issue, it seems that there are some deep biases when it comes to social. All of these biases are based in the fact that luxury brands believe their customer are fundamentally different than the “general” consumer.
The biases I’ve seen are:
1.) Wealthy customers are generally older, therefore they don’t use social as much
2.) Wealthy customers are private, and don’t want to share
Social should be important to luxury brands, because they rely heavily on word-of-mouth. The disconnect is that the word-of-mouth they rely on is often not from their customers, but from the folks that aspire to be customers.
A great luxury social strategy is inclusive of those who can’t afford luxury, but will talk about it… and most luxury brands fear being inclusive.
Maybe it is a function of time. Is there a transmission mechanism whereby companies get into online commerce before they move to a strategic approach to the use of social media?
Fifteen years ago we were debating if all brands needed a presence on the internet. Shoes and cars were labeled as “high touch” products that didn’t make sense to flog on the web.
Last year, The Economist reported that jewelry maker Fabergé set out to see if you could sell luxury goods without global presence and fancy retail spaces. They reportedly met their target of acquiring 50 customers within a set timeframe, each customer spent an average of $100k.
I’ve worked with a few Italian luxury brands and while I can’t get much into the details, there are a lot of social media strategies that makes sense, and might be based on exacly the principles of exclusiveness that these kind of brand require. Of course, most of the work can be social, but not necessarily social *media*. The kind of network some luxury brands want to build – or already has! – isn’t the kind of network that a consumer brand has.
To do that kind of design you need to understand very, very well the conditions and the kind of exclusivity that that specific brand is trying to convey, and build the social experience around these values.
One of the brands I’ve worked with for example was completely and actively avoiding ANY advertisement, communication or campaign whatsoever. They have “stores” but are invite only. Still, they are working to create a strong, technology-enabled social network… a kind of network that probably won’t be recognized as such by normal standards, but it is indeed social and have social features by the human relationship point of view.
The lesson here, and I think it’s very generalizable, is that social experiences can exist at very different levels, and you have always to design the correct one to enhance and be aligned with the values of the people interacting with the brand itself.
“According to a survey of millionaires from Fidelity Investments, 85% of respondents use text-messaging, smartphone applications and social media.” (WSJ June 16 ).
As I said in a previous comment on this blog some customers may be happy to have a ‘social’ shopping experience, share their latest purchase with friends on FB or indicate on Foursquare that they are currently at an Armani store. But others may well be looking for a more intimate shopping experience akin to what they get in brick and mortar stores. For them it may be much more important to enjoy a-same-day delivery, a super easy way to return a purchase, an easy 24/7 access to store representatives either via phone or (video) chat etc.
New tools (social, mobile) offer luxury brands huge opportunities to create this intimate shopping experience. But this calls for a social business approach instead of a social media campaign, in which the luxury brand has also adjusted its internal processes and re-defined its interaction with the ecosystem (e.g. customers, partners, suppliers).