In a time when understanding the global luxury consumer is important but daunting, some brands have taken the challenge and turned to social CRM activities to enhance the luxury customer experience no matter where they are.
Social CRM, Connecting With Luxury Consumers Anywhere
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
In a time when understanding the global luxury consumer is important but daunting, some brands have taken the challenge and turned to social CRM activities to enhance the luxury customer experience no matter where they are.
International brands are at constant odds with delivering a consistently exclusive and seamless customer experience globally, while also adapting to relevant nuances for local markets and consumer behaviors, and especially so when it comes to hospitality. Across geographic markets, brands implement Customer Relationship Management systems and tactics sized to fit that market, to understand those local customers better.
Yet global integration has not been without it’s challenges, with inconsistencies in market needs and variables, as well as deployment and data collection methods. Specifically in China, brands using standard email marketing approaches are met with the country’s unique intranet style internet challenges. Furthermore as a digital nation of online shoppers, brands participate in e-commerce activities through owned and third party platforms, making CRM integration even more complex.
However, with nearly 3 million trips to the US alone in 2015, the need to understand the volumes of China’s global luxury consumers is a must-do even if a daunting feat. Learning who they are, where they are and where they are going next, what they are interested in, and how to communicate to them at the right place and time are among some of the data points relevant to attract and retain them.
In China, social CRM is a solution that is taking off, leveraging the deep integration of WeChat in the daily lives of Chinese individuals. Last year Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts began Social CRM activities, gaining insights and key learnings that have shaped content development, delivery, and targeting, and improved overall activities and consumer engagement.
John Hamilton, Four Seasons Director of Marketing and Communications for the APAC region, shared about the hotel group's past year’s activities at the Luxury Society Keynote in Shanghai:
Partner & Head of International Client Development, DLG
Iris has 15 years of marketing experience in agencies and consultancies in the North American and Asia Pacific markets, specializing in the luxury category. She has worked closely with brands including Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts, LVMH, Richemont, Ermenegildo Zegna, Christian Louboutin, Estée Lauder Companies and Ralph Lauren. Her marketing experience spans the areas of branding and communication strategy, digital strategy, market research and analysis, media and editorial planning, as well as online and offline activations. Previously based in Shanghai for over five years, Iris now resides in New York.