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How Should Luxury Brands Engage in Social Media?

This past week, Women’s Wear Daily released an extensive recap of the WWD Luxury Forum. The consensus among luxury professionals is that luxury brands and retailers need  to build solid marketing foundations online and those foundations (based off of social media) should focus on building communities and keeping audiences engaged.

Ogilvy Digital 360′s Rohit Bhargava and Forrester Research Analyst Jeremiah Owyang recently compiled better practice recommendations for luxury brands venturing into the social media arena. Bhargava’s and Owyang’s practices are starting points for luxury retailers who are contemplating a venture into social marketing.

Can luxury retailers venture into social marketing without losing their prestige, aspirational values and sophistication?

“Luxury brands are the IDEAL brands to be using social media and that social networking, microblogging and online content creation represent big opportunities for these brands to really stand out, improve their customer loyalty, drive sales and, in fact, maintain the image they have worked hard to create for their brands”, says Bhargava.

In order for  luxury brands to distinguish themselves diluting their brand, Owyang suggests that luxury brands:

1. Monitor and listen to understand customer needs.  First, hire a brand monitoring company that can understand the needs of your customers in the real time social web.  Radian 6, Altierian, Scout Labs, Visible Technologies frequently come up in conversation, and there’s a larger group of incumbents such as Dow Jones Factiva, Nielsen Buzzmetrics, and TNS Cymfony. – Owyang

My Thoughts: As we’ve recommended in our community management and development posts, listening to what customers are saying online, whether they’ve purchased your product or not, is imperative. It not only shows a brand where their current customers are, it exposes new markets. Community monitoring provides real-time consumer sentiment and perceptions of a brand’s products. Are the messages that Internet audiences are delivering in line with a brand’s message and image?

2. Start off by using sharing tools. Sharing tools enable customers to share corporate-created content such as videos, blog posts, images, and contests.  Vendors such as Share This, Add This or other similar technologies can easily get a brand up and running.  Why is this a good first start?  It simply extends the corporate approved and created content to the social realm. – Owyang

My Thoughts: This is usually our first recommendation to clients: add social sharing buttons. A brand or retailer with an e-commerce site needs to make the sharing barrier as low as possible to encourage customers, potential customers and citizen fashion journalists (aka bloggers) to share products across their social communities. We recommend taking this a step further and make sure you add fashion-site-specific sharing icons if the fashion communities that a brand’s engaged with or sponsoring. Chictopia, Style Hive, ThisNext and Polyvore all have sharing features and even “clipping” tools. This is also the perfect time to explore if a brand should develop its own widgets. Interactive widgets boost website traffic and increase the ROI on social media initiatives.

3. Create “On-Brand” Contests. Develop programs that maintain the sanctity of the premium experience by developing a program that encourages members to share the preferred experience with others. Example: Develop a Facebook app that asks a quiz “Which one of your friends is most likely to buy our beauty product?” and then encourage them to share it. – Owyang

My Mindset: When creating brand contests, users love things that feel highly personalized. But in the case of luxury brands, be sure that the contests fit qualities – for instance, “passion”, “escapism”, “aspirational” – that the audience equates with the brand. As a community member, I may not be swayed by the beauty product my friend buys, but I sure care about what I’d buy, even if that curiosity is born out of a meaning-seeking or authenticity-thinking mindset. Brand contests are great ways to show consumers how a brand is relevant to his or her life.

Fashism.com

4. Highlight consumer-created content from “preferred” customer segments. If celebrities are using your products and talk about them, echo it back and highlight them. Example: highlight users of your products in your blog, from Twitter, or other social technology (for example, writing about “See how Ashton sports our latest suits”), and allow users to share and spread this kind of news to their own websites using simple tools like ShareThis. – Owyang

My Thoughts: Though celebrity product lines have started to lose their luster, celebrity endorsements still hold weight with many consumers and their aspirations. Celebrity sells. Using celebrity isn’t the only kind of endorsing that sells products, however. User-generated content from fashion loving consumers, independent fashion bloggers and digital fashion celebrities are powerful word-of-mouth marketing and sales tools. Sites like Lookbook.Nu, Fashism, Closet Couture, Weardrobe and ModePass allow community members to post their own photos of outfits they put together themselves. H&M, Urban Outfitters, Gap and other retailers have had amazing results in sponsoring outfit contests; the winner(s) receiving a gift certificate, product or special opportunity. User-generated content is a gold mine, and there are thousands of people sharing and spreading retailers products across the web. This past weekend, Estee Lauder held in-store product demos and makeovers, offering participants on-site professional photos that they could upload as profile pictures on their social networking sites. This is a perfect example of a brand using their online marketing and PR to drive awareness to in-store events. The best part is that the in-store event tied back to the online social media efforts. It was seamless. Bravo Estee Lauder for great execution (something that all luxury brands need to consider in their social marketing initiatives).

5. Develop or sponsor lifestyle communities. Branded communities, social networks, or bloggers can all be reached using traditional media relations tactics. Not unlike traditional sponsorship and spokesperson product trial programs, you can develop brand affinity in the social space through formal programs.  The trick, however, is understanding how your products can become a platform to uplift their voice –not just to insert your own. – Owyang

My Thoughts: Luxury brands can actually take social media a step further. Many luxury brands are developing their own social networks or even invitation-only communities. Sponsoring communities can be a chance to develop brand affinity and establish authentic consumer-brand relationships. Not all of a luxury brand’s social media strategies should be about mass awareness. Quality over quantity still has its place. Sites such as MyItThings, LadyLux, LuxuryCulture or Just Luxe can have a better ROI as their audiences are more likely to become paid customers. And while some may not agree with me — when it comes to luxury brands, social media ROI does extend to sales.