Some verbatim from the interview we gave yesterday to WWD on the challenges and opportunities for luxury brands and social media.
There are a series of challenges and opportunities…
- Understand real-time content. Whether they like it or not, in the new environment, luxury brands are also publishers. We all are. And bloggers are the new editors. They will need to find new kinds of information to deliver, and new ways to deliver it. Fashion brands have already been challenged over the speeding up of fashion cycles. 6 monthly runway shows were losing visibility in the constant pulses of novelty from lower-end competitors. We will be hearing a lot more about real-time in 2010.
- Start a dialogue. This is almost becoming a cliché, but… Unlike mainstream brands, luxury brands depend on turning the products into symbols by adding meaning in a specific way. The traditional goal of luxury goods was to inspire consumers to dream. And it was felt that you needed to surprise the consumer, not talk to them directly. Luxury brands have traditionally delivered the product, the meaning and the message to the consumer, and the consumer has been good enough to buy it. That’s no longer the case. Consumers want to be involved. They are demanding it, whether or not the brand wants them to…
- Be social! In the new environment everyone can talk about your brand, your product. And so the amount of information that marketing and PR teams can generate is an increasingly small percentage of what is being said. And because of the way search engines work, it is the most popular voices that rise to the surface. That’s the power of the blogger. Many brands try to smother the conversation, or drown it – around half of companies in the US ban social media. A smarter strategy is to join the conversation.
At the risk of being facile, social media is SOCIAL. It’s a lot like being social at a cocktail party. And for luxury brands it’s OK to be late to the party as long as you know why you came to the party. And as long as you bring something to share.
Some luxury brands have been so spooked by social media that they appear to have lost their social skills. Louis Vuitton is currently running Heritage Tweets on their Twitter feeds, with facts and figures about the company. This is the equivalent of being at a party and announcing your birthday without being asked. Is not wrong, just not the most comfortable or interesting thing for everyone else to hear.
- Be open to shifts in structure. Social media is changing the way that brands are structured. It has implications for all departments of a company, is not just an enhanced opportunity for PR and visibility. This is perhaps the biggest challenge for luxury brands is the way in which social media will affect all aspects of the brand; in terms of marketing, PR, and even production.
- Deploy new talent. Luxury brands are going to need a range of new talents to help them make the transition to the new environment. However our concern is that they will jump straight into thinking they have a need for social media experts (they seem to be popping up everywhere), and hiring people who have recently added social media to their resume.
- Be creative! Over the last month or so, Art of the Trench by Burberry has become the breakthrough success in social media; and we can expect lots of ‘versions’ of this idea in 2010. The danger is that Burberry’s tactics will be copied by other brands, but without an understanding of the strategy behind it.
Art of the Trench is really just the first shot of what comes next. Is there any particular reason that Burberry should be the first to seize the opportunity? Not particularly, except that they believe in it, and were willing to take the first step. And it has elevated them to the first luxury brand with true credibility.
However, there is a danger that “social media” will be in 2010, what the word “green” was in 2008. And that Art of the Trench knockoffs will be the execution idea that takes over from the “pop-up store” as the exciting idea of the day.
The recent IHT conference seems to have been a turning point. For the first time there was consensus around the fact that social media was important. Suzy Menkes made an analogy to this being the period of the silent movies right before the talkies arrived. And she’s right. It’s as big a shift as that.
But – a caveat – one thing about trends is that they are always over-estimated in the short-term and under-estimated in the long-term. If brands jump on a Twitter strategy now, they will have to jump on a FourSquare strategy in early 2010, and a Google Wave strategy straight afterwards. Brands should not be chasing media, they should be creating information to share. And they should be really looking at their overall brand strategy.
What luxury brands need is not social media strategy, its brand building strategy that promise business growth. Social media is increasingly going to be one of the tools to achieve that.
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