DIGITAL
China Is Now the Leading Source of Traffic to Luxury Watch Websites
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Insights from the latest WorldWatchReport™ Benchmark show how luxury watch brands focus their digital investments in China. However, optimising the user experience remains a major challenge for them. Chinese consumer…
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
Insights from the latest WorldWatchReport™ Benchmark show how luxury watch brands focus their digital investments in China. However, optimising the user experience remains a major challenge for them.
Chinese consumer interest in luxury watch and jewellery brands has been growing significantly over recent years. Last year, however, marked the first time that China dethroned the US in terms of user visits to luxury watch websites. According to insights from the WorldWatchReport™ Benchmark that was released a few days ago, the total number of visits from China accounted for about 21% of global traffic, while numbers chalked up by the US weighed in at about 13%.
Image: WorldWatchReport™ Benchmark 2018
These figures emphasise the healthy state in which Swiss watch exports to China are in. According to the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry, exports have experienced a growth of 44% over the course of one year – valued at 177 million Swiss francs.
“The destiny of the Swiss watch industry is now tied to Asia, and China specifically,” says David Sadigh, CEO and Founder of DLG (Digital Luxury Group), the digital marketing and communications agency that conducts the Benchmark every year. “Global watch brands that do not manage to generate desirability in China will find it hard to sustain their businesses in the long run,” he adds.
For the past 10 years, DLG has been publishing the WorldWatchReport™, the leading market intelligence study in the global luxury watch industry. Launched in 2017 and based on 120 million online visits across more than 20 markets, the WorldWatchReport™ Benchmark analyses the performance of luxury watch brand websites. It explores topics ranging from the role of a brand’s website, to the impact of social media on drive-to-store, as well as the importance of balancing owned and earned media. The study helps brands leverage their digital strategies to create a seamless customer journey that will result in measurable business results.
Key takeaways from the 2018 Benchmark:
- China has, by far, the highest advertising exposure in the world. Poor quality traffic is consequently a major challenge.
- In order to improve the quality of traffic to websites in China, luxury watch brands need to optimise their advertising investments and the experience proposed on their websites.
- Brands should not think of WeChat merely as a social media platform, but as a full eco-system.
WorldWatchReport Insights 2018
Editor, International, Luxury Society
Dino Auciello is the International Editor of Luxury Society. He is also Head of Marketing & Client Development at DLG, the parent company of Luxury Society. Based in Geneva, Dino was previously Deputy Chief Editor of the Swiss business magazine, Bilan.
