Luxury Brands Fail Marketing Integration Test, Not Surprised.
Reading the below WARC article, it comes as no surprise that some luxury brands fail when it comes to integration. Failing in delivering consistent messages and experiences across all channels damages the relationship brands have with their existing and potential customers. Especially when it comes to luxury where every interaction and experience, should be flawless! So why are luxury brands not creating strategies and content that is based around organising ideas that are built for integration?
Because many luxury brands still believe that their clients will not shop online, that they are too sophisticated for social media, and that the only way to attract their attention is to put a glossy advert in a glossy magazine.
How wrong they are… See the full WARC article below (for the online version see here):
Luxury brands fail omnichannel test
NEW YORK: Many luxury brands have developed good sites or apps or in-store technology but few have successfully brought them all together to offer a consistent omnichannel experience, a leading marketer has said.
“Luxury is a couple of steps behind, as usual,” luxury marketing consultant Tony King told eMarketer.
He said that consumers would typically use several devices while researching a purchase. “People will check something seven or eight times online before they actually buy – that’s a big thing with luxury, so the experience has to be consistent across devices.”
Luxury marketers were also operating in a different environment to the mainstream. “Luxury consumers respond to access rather than promotion,” explained King. “They want to know they have something other people can’t get yet, so that means exclusive products.”
He suggested that a good salesperson would be able tophone up a customer to tell them that an item they would like was becoming available. “That’s what ecommerce is lacking, and that has to improve,” he stated.
Most websites already had all the necessary data, he argued, but were failing to use it in the best possible way. “Websites should be digital tools that allow real people to get early information to each other,” he said. “It’s a way of setting up that exclusive club.”
King also noted that there was a degree of snobbery and elitism in the luxury business that held brands back. “I think a lot of brands want consumers to come to them, and they don’t want to be seen as trying too hard,” he said.
As an example of how luxury brands were falling down digitally he cited Alexander McQueen, “a theatrical, dramatic, incredible brand”. While these aspects of the brand were evident in store, they were completely lacking on the website.
“If I put my hand over the logo, the website could be almost any other brand, and that’s disappointing,” he said, before adding that “luxury is a place where the rules can be broken”.
Data sourced from eMarketer; additional content by Warc staff, 29 November 2013
At Flock we believe that luxury brands need to integrate just as much, if not more than other categories. They need to follow their customers who are digital, shop around, expect consistently seamless experiences that are channel agnostic. Luxury brands who are investing in integration and are doing it very well indeed are Jaguar and Burberry (read an interesting article here). Below we have used examples of how Burberry is doing brilliantly integrated marketing.
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