Today, 92% of luxury brands operate an official account on WeChat, proving that the platform has been adopted en masse in China. Digital Luxury Group took a deep dive into the activities of 25 luxury fashion brands, uncovering how they’ve embraced WeChat and what the roadmap for future development looks like.
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WeChat & Luxury Fashion in 2017
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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, 92% of luxury brands operate an official account on WeChat, proving that the platform has been adopted en masse in China. Digital Luxury Group took a deep dive into the activities of 25 luxury fashion brands, uncovering how they’ve embraced WeChat and what the roadmap for future development looks like.
Over the years, WeChat has evolved significantly. Opening its API to the public and continually rolling out new functionality has contributed to expanding the horizons of digitally active luxury brands. Over time, these new platform services, and the ease of connecting WeChat to external databases thanks to its API, led WeChat to be viewed as an established service-oriented platform. Compared to other Chinese social media platforms such as Weibo, WeChat never limited itself to simple content broadcasting.
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Fully aware of this evolution and the opportunity it provided, luxury fashion brands started to develop WeChat-specific features through their Official Accounts, that took advantage of the added-value services offered by WeChat.
Today, ⅔ of the luxury fashion brands active on WeChat now operate a Service Account, a step up from Subscription Accounts, which are primarily used by news and media entities. Gucci, for example, which was an early WeChat adopter, transitioned last month its Subscription Account, followed by hundreds of thousands of followers, into a new Service Account to better complement its basic content broadcasting activities. To be noted that since recently WeChat allows to upgrade an account from Subscription to Service.
Above on the left, the message sent by Gucci to its followers, inviting them to follow the new Service Account. Upon scanning the QR code, users would be redirect to Gucci’s new Service Account.
Key Differences between WeChat Subscription and Service Accounts
But operating a Service Account, without providing service-oriented features represents a missed opportunity and lack of alignment with consumer expectations. One of the first features that brands prioritized was anything that would generate in-store traffic, and the store locator was key to that.
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Today, 88% of luxury fashion brands active on WeChat offer a store locator feature. User experience of such features was a challenge in the past (with Google Maps blocked or partially working in China), but we now observe that 73% are offering this service through the integration of a local map solution (Baidu Maps, Tencent Maps or Gaode), rather than Google, in order to guarantee an optimal user experience. In addition 76% are offering location-based services, allowing users to directly find a nearby store or directions on how to get there.
The above is a great illustration that brands are now ready to invest in developing the right solutions to support their customer experience but digging deeper also shows areas where brands can improve. Among the sample of brands analyzed, ⅔ are not providing any customer service on WeChat, meaning that in some cases, automated answers would redirect the user to a hotline or the corporate website’s FAQ, and in even worse scenarios, questions were simply left unanswered.
Another relevant illustration is when it comes to O2O (the acronym for online-to-offline, also referred to as “omni-channel” in the West) and how brands are trying to take advantage of WeChat to generate a transaction or at least stimulate the act of purchase by driving traffic to both online or offline point of sales. While it may not be a surprise to see that only 24% of the luxury fashion brands analyzed were integrating call-to-actions and links to an e-commerce platform, 0% currently offer the possibility to setup an appointment in-store or request a call-back from the sales staff.
Another major surprise was about the development of CRM programs through WeChat since only 16% of the brands analyzed were providing their users with options to join a loyalty program or simply to register their profile as a client.
Example of Cartier’s Appointment Feature on WeChat
Last but not least, when analyzing the performance of the store locator functions on WeChat, we realized that only 18% provided a service that worked abroad which, when we think about it, is a situation during which a customer would need even more help than when they shop in their home country.
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All in all, the below illustration summarize well a situation where brands are indeed embracing WeChat and its promise to serve the users, but it also shows that a serious commitment to get things right by really understanding customer expectations is required to approach WeChat in a mature way. Online and social CRM have been at the core of most of the strategic discussions led by luxury brands when it comes to WeChat, but it seems that there is still a long way to go before developing WeChat strategies for fashion luxury brands that really goes the way of the users.
* Data collected by Digital Luxury Group on WeChat on December 31st, 2016, sample of 25 luxury fashion brands include: Balenciaga, Bally, Berluti, Bottega Veneta, Burberry, Chanel, Chloé, Christian Dior, Coach, DKNY, Dolce & Gabbana, Fendi, Givenchy, Gucci, Hermès, Kenzo, Loewe, Loro Piana, Louis Vuitton, Marc Jacobs, Michael Kors, Prada, Saint Laurent, Thomas Pink, Valentino
Partner and Managing Director, China, Luxury Society
Pablo Mauron is the Managing Director at Digital Luxury Group China. Based in Shanghai since 2012, his team successfully manages 360° digital and consulting projects for major luxury brands.
