At Luxe Pack Shanghai 2017 held in April, Ifop CEO Stephane Truchi and Luxurynsight CEO Jonathan Siboni shared their views on how luxury brands should adapt to the digital era in a conference entitled “The Digital Transformation of Luxury”.
While 50% of Chinese domestic luxury consumption will be generated online by 2020, it is of the utmost importance that luxury brands remain abreast of digital innovations and place them at the very heart of their development strategies.
Although luxury brands are forever more accessible and time has speeded up subsequently to the development of digital technologies, Stephane Truchi places emphasis on how important it is for luxury brands to maintain their focus on the traditional values of luxury which include one to one relationships with clients, a physical point of sale, sensoriality and paying close attention to clients’ needs in particular through advice and direct contact.
In this way, the challenge facing brands today is to bring these two worlds together and create a balance between “slow time” and “fast time”, while preserving the essential dimensions of luxury such as mystery, rarity, excellence, expertise and occasionally keeping a distance from the digital universe by focusing on interaction, dialogue and ephemeral actions.
Finally, Stephane Truchi closed the conference by outlining three key strategies to ensure that luxury brands maintain their exclusivity in a digital world accessible to everyone:
- Create an irresistible desire – brands need to expand their range of visual, written and video materials with remarkable content, thereby revealing unknown facets to clients, fostering intimacy with new generations (millennials), and opening new channels via influencers.
- Deliver a unique experience via new technologies and initiatives to ascertain a seamless service, while creating an opportunity for interaction between the digital and the physical worlds and tapping into social interaction.
- Foster a close relationship with clients based on the latest advances in technology such as chatbots, thus encouraging automatic interaction between clients and the brand, ensuring personalisation of support services and providing the opportunity for real-time interaction with a community.
