Luxury Fashion Brands Embrace Social Media

The latest round of global catwalk shows has illustrated how fast things are changing in the world of fashion marketing.

At the Dolce & Gabbana show, fashion bloggers  Scott Schuman, Bryan Yambao, Tommy Ton and Garance Doré were seen tapping away at their laptops from seats usually only reserved for the likes of Anna Wintour,  whilst the show was streamed lived on the Dolce & Gabbana website.  With 16m hits in just a few days, D&G’s YouTube channel became the most watched in the world for a 24 hour period.

Louis Vuitton also broadcast a recent catwalk show live, through Facebook from Paris, attracting 50,000 guests from its 750,000 fans on the social media site.  And the celebrity-inspired power of twitter was demonstrated when a Lady Gaga tweet led to so much traffic to the live stream of Alexander McQueen’s show that his site crashed.

Since the shows, we’ve seen the launch of Burberry’s www.artofthetrench.com, a site which combines the appeal and talent of Sartorialist blogger Scott Schuman with the power of social media to deepen relationships with existing customers and forge relationsips with new ones.

And Gucci has launched its latest eyewear range with a viral campaign rather than using traditional media channels.  Its site, www.guccieyeweb.com, lets visitors upload their own photographs and then displays their picture as if were a reflection in the various eyewear styles. Users can share their ‘eyewear reflections’ on facebook, twitter and on the social bookmarking sites.

So should all luxury brands rush headlong into social media? No – as with all marketing, the starting place should be an understanding of your target market, followed by a clear strategy.   For luxury fashion brands, ’mass’ social media is a more obvious move as their lower entry price points makes them accessible to a wider audience.  For brands with a narrower appeal, the strategy might be very different – more personal relationships built via closed or invitation only networks rather than openly accessible ones.

The problem is that many brands aren’t engaging with social media for the wrong reasons – either because they don’t understand how their customers are using it or a fear of losing control of their brands.

Recent research shows that the affluent are just as likely to use social media channels as the mass market, albeit for more rational and less frivolous reasons. And those that comfort themselves with the thought that their older profile of customer has so far shunned social media should understand that the continuing growth of sites such as Facebook is being fuelled by the over 55s.

As for the fear of losing control, conversations have always taken place about luxury brands that were beyond the control of the brand owners. Social media helps to facilitate more of these conversation and spread them faster and wider. But it also makes those conversations more visible and gives the brand a chance to both get involved with and facilitate them – to deepen relationships with existing customers and create relationships with potential new ones.

Social media is just one of the channels available to the marketer and the right social media strategy starts with an understanding of who your customers are and how they’re engaging online. As a starting point, Forrester’s Social Technology Profile Tool should give you some clues. Then start to monitor what’s been said about your brand and where. Once you start to understand where and how your customers are interacting online, you’ve taken the first step to building a considered social networking strategy.

One thing is for certain, with developments such as real-time social search and Google SideWiki on the horizon, luxury brands ignoring social media aren’t going to be able to ignore it for much longer.

By: Catriona Deery

From catwalk to laptop, fashion houses embrace Web

MILAN -- Photo blogger Tommy Ton used to wait outside exclusive venues for fashionistas to arrive and leave catwalk shows, but at the latest Dolce & Gabbana womenswear run this season, he proudly sat in the front row.

Sitting close to the creme de la creme of fashion editors -- Vogue’s Anna Wintour and Glenda Bailey of Harper’s Bazaar -- the Toronto fashionista excitedly blogged about his privileged treatment in Milan on his site www.jakandjil.com from his seat.

"I’ve been going [to fashion week] for two years and I was lucky if I even got a response," he told Reuters. "But being embraced by Dolce&Gabbana, that was a defining moment."

Soon after his success in Milan, French maisons sent him invitations to Paris fashion week, eager to have him at their shows.

Fashion brands, increasingly aware of the power of bloggers, are making room for them in their front-row seats to try to grab consumers before they visit their stores.

For years, traditional houses have shunned the Internet, seeing it mostly as a place for those in search of bargains.

But as younger buyers and working women are set to replace ageing customers as the main luxury consumers, the Web and its social networking sites represent strong prospects for growth.

In the September fashion week run, such design houses as Louis Vuitton, Dolce & Gabbana and Alexander McQueen, streamed their catwalk shows on the Internet.

Facebook is full of brands, including Vuitton, Gucci and Burberry with hundreds of thousands of fans, who also voice their passion for fashion on Twitter.

"The more you can open up your brand to the client, the better," Gucci designer Frida Giannini told a luxury conference in Berlin last month.

Fashion dot com

Many fashion brands have opened online stores in the last year, including Salvatore Ferragamo and Roberto Cavalli. Hugo Boss, which sells on the Internet in Europe, plans for online stores in Asia and in the US.

"We try to understand the online shopper in a deep way," Chief Executive Claus-Dietrich Lahrs told the Berlin conference.

Giorgio Armani has a mobile phone platform for e-commerce, so users can shop for Emporio Armani items from their handsets.

Prada is looking at selling online products that have yet to make it into its stores.

"In five years, 30% of [fashion] goods will be sold on the Internet in America," Prada Chief Executive Patrizio Bertelli was quoted in Italian newspapers as saying, without giving a comparative figure.

When Italian online fashion retailer Yoox launched in 2000, there was a lot of "skepticism about the Internet in general and online sales," founder and Chief Executive Federico Marchetti told Reuters. Now it also operates retail sites for brands like Valentino and Marni. Yoox is poised for an initial public offering this week in Milan.

"Increasingly fashion brands are shifting their communication budgets to the Web, and have a greater understanding of its potential and in particular they now are all requesting an online store," he said in e-mailed comments.

Luxury groups are focusing on winning customers as they emerge from the worst economic crisis in decades. Bain & Co, a consultancy, expects luxury sales to fall 8% this year to €153 billion.

While online sales are unlikely to make up the difference soon, consumers’ growing confidence and comfort in using the Internet to shop provide positive signals.

Bain says "luxury shame" -- the fear of being seen shopping for luxurious items in a recession -- is also helping. It sees 2009 online luxury sales up 20% to_3.6 billion -- representing 2.35% of total luxury sales this year.

Luxury goods companies "were very traditional in their advertising methods and tools and in what they thought of consumers", Bain partner Claudia d’Arpizio said.

"Now they understand the consumer age is different and their values are changing so [they] need different tools to attract and interest them."

In the US, while most sectors of the economy experienced a downturn in the first quarter of 2009, online sales for 80 retailers rose by an average 11%, according to a report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Ferragamo Chief Executive Michele Norsa said he saw its online store becoming "a nice shop" next year with "several million euros" in sales.

Echoing Norsa, Valentino’s top executive, Stefano Sassi, said its store that sells accessories and its younger line was "in constant growth."

Allure of the Web

The Web’s allure is easy to understand. Designers can present their creations directly to customers without relying on media reviews, which may not be favorable.

Designers can also save on advertising, especially as they cut marketing budgets.

When it comes to global advertising, the Internet is the only medium expected to expand -- with 9.2% growth forecast for 2009 -- while all other media are set to shrink, according to media agency ZenithOptimedia.

"[The Web] is very important by the sheer fact people are spending more time online, on Facebook, Twittering," Emanuel Ungaro Chief Executive Mounir Moufarrige said. He said online and glossy magazine ads were complementary.

One challenge fashion houses will face will be how to deal with the lag between photos of new collections going online as they are presented and them hitting the stores six months later, when they could seem dated.

"If you’re an artist and the only one who can come up with those color combinations and those prints... people will wait as long as they have to," said Scott Schuman, a fashion industry veteran-turned-blogger through his The Sartor-ialist site. "If you’re just an everyday designer and you’ve just come out with some thing and somebody else can do it better, cheaper or get it to [consumers] faster, they’ll buy that."

With new Web ventures like Dolce & Gabbana’s magazine Swide and Burberry’s social network site www.artofthetrench.com, many maisons are constantly thinking of new online tools to woo fans. "It’s marketing as usual, this just happens to be the new thing," Schuman said. -- Reuters

Social media is about conversations, about consumers, but mostly about communities. It’s no longer enough for brands to communicate, people have to communicate with each other about your brand.

All of our current work is focused on communities, understanding the connective tissues that joins people together, and how to involve brands in their conversations – and in particular we focus on cults as an extreme version of communities – ones with the most to teach luxury brands. That’s the real future of social media

We are at an interesting crossroads in consumer culture.  Where luxury purchases used to be the ultimate sign of affluence or, at least, aspiring affluence, more consumers now may be driven to make conspicuously conscious purchases.  According to research co-authored by Aronte Bennett and mentioned in her MediaPost article, corporate social responsibility (CSR) seems to be becoming a strong motivator influencing consumers today – even in these bad economic times.  As she put it:

In a variety of experiments, our research found that consumers like CSR-associated products for two distinct reasons.

First, the fact that these products send out highly visible, social signals to their friends, family and co-workers regarding their kindness and charitable nature.

Second, they like the more private, self-signaling potential associated with the purchases of these products, even when a strong public social signal is absent to others.

These consumers like the visibility of what they are doing and they also gain in self-regard.  This is sounding familiar, like a whole other market – luxury.

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Andrea Learned is a marketing dot-connector with a focus on gender and a longterm view on coming trends. Andrea's broad, colorful commentary can be found regularly on her blog, Learned on Women.