Luxury brands and web-marketing

One of the concerns related to luxury brands in the cosmetics’ industry is to have a better mastery of their image in their sales network, whether online or offline.

In fact, up to now, the principle of operating on the internet works like in stores: large companies make their retailers take care of marketing their products and loose then control on the service and its image. Jean Paul Gaultier brought a new innovative approach following the example of “shop-in-shop” of luxury brands in big stores, by launching a “website-in-webshop”.

The idea is simple: create a website that is accessible from the distributor’s website to offer all the ranges of the brand, the content and graphics are related to the DNA of the brand and remind of its vision, and its developed imagination. It’s only when it’s time for an actual order that the internet user is sent back to the website source of the distributor who will manage the sale.

It’s obvious that the control of image is, more than over, in the centre of strategies of luxury brands when internet offers a maximum exposure to these brands.

Why is this new interest for the web channel?

If luxury brands avoided internet in its beginnings,it’s because it may get disruptive to their business models: “US customers tend to get better deals, while Asian consumers often pay hefty premium-and they did not want that fact exposed by a globally accessible website”.

But on the other hand, internet is a fabulous medium to reach a larger number of potential consumers, without big expenses on a large network of stores, namely in China. This way, many luxury brands have just a few stores, like Dunhill for example (one in UK, one in the USA, but none in Italy or Germany), the Internet offers them the chance to be known quickly.

Furthermore, referring to a study done by Ledbury Research, “rich” people are online more than other population categories, and therefore spend more money online. It’s then one of the reasons why luxury brands take special care of their websites and of multiplying buying possibilities online.

The risk is once more a massification of the products and a huge accessibility, with the risk of losing interest in these brands. The stake of these luxury and style companies is to find, in the future, a “presence balance” on the internet to avoid making the same mistakes, like some did with the massif extension of licences. To be continued…