Ahead of the Luxury Society Keynote on November 29, we sit down with speaker Elsa Wang, Head of Communications at Swarovski China, about the ways in which one of China’s biggest social media platforms, WeChat, has been able to help her brand build awareness and loyalty in the Chinese market.
LS Keynote 2017 Speaker Introduction: Elsa Wang, Swarovski
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
Ahead of the Luxury Society Keynote on November 29, we sit down with speaker Elsa Wang, Head of Communications at Swarovski China, about the ways in which one of China’s biggest social media platforms, WeChat, has been able to help her brand build awareness and loyalty in the Chinese market.
In what way has WeChat been a useful tool for Swarovski as a brand?
For Swarovski, we’d like to fully leverage WeChat’s various functions to connect with consumers in a long-term way. This nurtures brand desirability and drives consideration. We’d also ultimately like to build up social commerce to enable WeChat to act as a full consumer funnel.
To do all this, we need to look at WeChat and consider the full spectrum of its functionalities. While we always had a strong focus on developing impactful and inspiring campaigns to support the development of our brand awareness, we now also focus on developing the service part with our loyalty program, My Crystal Club, and like I said, ultimately social commerce. This allows Swarovski to not only focus on acquisition of new prospects but also to reinforce the preferences and the loyalty of our audience through the value proposition of our WeChat account.
What are some of the programs or initiatives you have run via WeChat?
Over the past year, we ran several successful WeChat campaigns, for example Valentine's Day, which we used as an opportunity to introduce Maggie Jiang as our new ambassador and a way to localize the concept of "daring and brilliant" to the Chinese audience. We also did a first test case using the WeChat mini-program to support our Mother's Day campaign with a pop-up store specifically designed for the occasion. Last but not least, we introduced our WeChat loyalty program called My Crystal Club at the start of this year. It is fully integrated to our CRM infrastructure.
What are some of the outcomes you can share about brand awareness of Swarovski prior to these WeChat initiatives, compared with after?
It is hard to do a “before and after” exercise as the whole idea of implementing such activities is also to improve the level and accuracy of the measurement and analysis of our WeChat audience. That being said, such initiatives allow us now to also assess the result of our campaigns more qualitatively. Overall, it has all been very positive as we achieved our yearly objectives in terms of customer sign-ups and repeat purchases very quickly.
It makes sense to think of WeChat as an educational or informational tool. Could you tell us a little bit about its efficacy at building loyalty as well?
Users don't follow brands randomly on WeChat, you only decide to follow a brand when the brand appeals strongly to you or if there is a concrete benefit in doing so. In accordance with that, the expectations of this audience are very different from that of other social media networks.
WeChat gives us a way to reach out to a qualified audience of users that have signed up for such updates, on a weekly basis. That’s already half the battle won when it comes to building loyalty. Once that is done, the key is to constantly ask ourselves whether our content, campaigns and services developed on WeChat bring added value from a customer standpoint. This is obviously a challenge, but that is the beauty of this platform.
How key is customer retention to Swarovski? How do you balance your WeChat activities between customer acquisition and retention?
It is not really about balancing it – one cannot live without the other. The brand already enjoys a strong awareness in China so while we still and will always care about reinforcing aspiration for the brand and product, our growth is naturally linked to our ability to retain clients. At the end of the day, a sale is much easier to achieve with satisfied clients than with someone that never heard about your brand.
WeChat is an ever-evolving platform, what do you think will be next? How will brands such as Swarovski look to utilize WeChat in the future?
With new functions like searching, brand zone and mini programs, competition is fierce and brands have to be more active and much smarter to have a holistic WeChat strategy.
Editor, Women’s Wear Daily
An Australian-born writer, editor and author, Casey has lived in Shanghai since 2007 and spent the past decade covering China’s fast-changing consumer culture, economic realignment, luxury market, creative re-awakening and much more for publications such as Women’s Wear Daily, Forbes.com and the New York Times (International Edition).Over this time Casey has continued to improve her Chinese language abilities and now uses these skills to closely observe the country’s unique online culture and trends – her beat for Forbes.com is actually called “What’s Trending in China?”