Today’s luxury market is undergoing a considerable shift. Here, global luxury marketing agency Cocoon presents the latest trends and which luxury brands are going the extra mile to connect with consumers.
3 Luxury Trends Changing The Game
Over the last decade, collaborations between luxury brands and contemporary artists have gone beyond mere artistic partnerships towards a new kind of luxury branding.
PARIS – Art and fashion have always developed side by side, for fashion, like art, often gives visual expression to the cultural zeitgeist. During the 1920s, Salvador Dalí created dresses for Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiapparelli. In the 1930s, Ferragamo’s shoes commissioned designs for advertisements from Futurist painter Lucio Venna, while Gianni Versace commissioned works from artists such as Alighiero Boetti and Roy Lichtenstein for the launch of his collections. Yves Saint Laurent’s vast art collection, recently auctioned at Christie’s in Paris, testified to his great love of art and revealed the influence of a variety of artists on his own designs.
In the 1980s, relationships between luxury brands and artists were advanced when Alain Dominique Perrin created the Fondation Cartier. In the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, a book marking the foundation’s 20th anniversary, Perrin says he makes “a connection between all the different sorts of arts, and luxury goods are a kind of art. Luxury goods are handicrafts of art, applied art.”
The Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemparain building in Paris
Today’s luxury market is undergoing a considerable shift. Here, global luxury marketing agency Cocoon presents the latest trends and which luxury brands are going the extra mile to connect with consumers.
Today’s luxury market is undergoing a considerable shift. Here, global luxury marketing agency Cocoon presents the latest trends and which luxury brands are going the extra mile to connect with consumers.
Consumers are less brand loyal than ever before, and are purchasing through multiple devices, making it even harder for brands to connect with them at the right time.
In this fast moving space, it is important for brands to keep their fingers on the pulse to stay fully relevant. These are some the luxury players listening to the signs and pro-actively pushing the limits.
“ Brands need to constantly adapt to change and target consumers individually, and by region ”
The Global Luxurian
Engaging with luxury consumers at the right time with the right message, with an understanding of cultural differences, is key. Each culture has its own cues. Brands need to constantly adapt to change and target consumers individually, and by region, all while staying true to brand identity.
Tiffany & Co. is doing just that with its latest ‘unlocking the Possibilities’ campaign. The Campaign features films – all in Chinese – which are posted to Chinese websites rather than YouTube.
The campaign’s two ambassadors, Chinese supermodel Liu Wen and actress and director Sylvia Chang, both of whom live very different lives, were chosen to demonstrate how the signature Tiffany Key is suitable for all women, and isn’t necessarily a romantic gift. The campaign’s tagline, ‘unlock the possibilities’, is targeted at the growing population of working woman in China, signifying the opportunities for them to go on to accomplish great things.
Social Is The New Store Front
Social media is accelerating luxury ecommerce, with more and more brands making purchasing via the likes of Instagram and Facebook easier for its consumers through the introduction of shoppable imagery.
Barneys released ‘Like2Buy’ for its Instagram, which enables consumers to purchase directly from its Instagram content. Indeed Instagram is fast becoming the new luxury look book, and consumers increasingly expect the opportunity to shop directly from social.
Barneys: Instagram ‘Like2Buy’
Similarly, accessories brand Coach leveraged Instagram’s new shoppable advertising to create excitement for its autumn handbag collection, by offering its Instagram followers an invitation to be the first to shop the new items via the platform.
Coach: Instagram shoppable advertising
Social is not only making the step to purchase easier, but it also presents brands with an inspirational window to millennials – an increasingly important demographic for luxury brands.
A brand doing just that is Burberry, which peeled back the curtain on its recent Mario Testino campaign through a live content feed via Snapchat.
Consumers had a 24-hour window to view the SS16 footage before the content disappeared, making it an ideal way to engage fans as well as creating a sense of exclusivity.
Burberry Snapchat campaign
Luxury Exhibitions
A number of luxury brands have developed their offering to incorporate experiential exhibitions in order to celebrate heritage and create engaging experiences and stories surrounding their brand.
Italian jeweler Bulgari is hosting an interactive exhibition between 30th October and 28th November in Harrods to celebrate some of its most glamorous celebrity fans. The exhibition celebrates the iconic Bulgari ‘diva’, including the likes of Gina Lollobrigida, Elizabeth Taylor, Ingrid Bergman and Anita Ekberg – all of whom were patrons of the Italian jewellery house.
The exhibition windows feature original imagery of the starlets wearing Bulgari’s creations, and enables consumers to actively engage by having their own ‘diva moment’ caught on camera.
Bulgari interactive exhibition
Meanwhile, French couture house Chanel delved into the creativity and inspiration of Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel and Karl Lagerfeld through an exhibit at London’s Saatchi Gallery last month.
“Mademoiselle Privé” provided a glimpse into the creation of the brand’s haute couture, fine jewellery and Chanel N°5, whilst creating an immersive brand experience, including a mobile app that revealed hidden content for visitors as they explored the exhibition.
Increasingly, affluent consumers want brands that offer more than the physical goods themselves, and Chanel is doing just that by engaging consumers in the brand and its heritage.
Chanel: Mademoiselle Privé exhibition
To further investigate luxury brand innovation on Luxury Society, we invite your to explore the related materials as follows:
– 6 Latest Luxury Brand Experiences: Michael Kors, Givenchy, Burberry
– 4 Latest Luxury Brand Experiences: Chanel, Burberry, YSL
– 6 Innovative Luxury Porto Cervo Pop-Ups
Marketing Manager, Microsoft
Charlotte is Marketing Manager at Cocoon, which is a global marketing offering that facilitates connections between luxury brands and their consumers. Cocoon understands the unique relationships, networks and cultures in the luxury space – and how to navigate them. So as well as providing tailored, high-quality marketing activity, it is uniquely placed to forge potential partnerships between high-net-worth individuals and brands working within the sector.