Information Technology Reference
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employees of luxury brands trying to promote their brands on online social
forums while pretending to be ordinary consumers interested in the brand.
Online consumers, especially the wealthy, are smart and savvy and will not toler-
ate brands that insult their intelligence through clearly manipulative messages.
Luxury brands may also draw clients to themselves or retain existing cli-
ents by creating and fostering communities around the brand. I don't mean
creating official communities on Facebook or MySpace but creating a unique
community that will congregate those interested in the brand or curious about
it. Luxury brand-based communities must however be very carefully executed.
In order to do so, there must be a strategic purpose behind the community,
with defined objectives and benefits. The central point of the community must
be clearly apparent to the members. Also the members should be given the
freedom of expression and direct interaction with the brand. If there is no real
value or benefit, people will just come, look and then go away and the brand
will lose its cachet. The community may be created to provide privileges to the
existing clients like the Very Dior club created by Parfums Christian Dior and
the Raymond Weil club (Figure 3.15); or it could be based on providing spe-
cific information on performance, functionality and maintenance of its prod-
ucts like the Aston Martin club. These communities, which are not based on
open invitations but on recruiting members among clients who have made pur-
chases, ensure that luxury brands stay close to existing clients while offering
an appeal to non-clients to be a part of these private communities. However,
private online clubs developed by brands should also include interactive fea-
tures and content that is beyond products and services or the usual top-down
information dissemination. This will enable sharing and connecting with other
members of the community, which is also beneficial to the brand.
Another approach to online communities built around a luxury brand is
through creating market-specific communities based on geographical location
or cultural factors. This means identifying the luxury markets in which people
“need” to be congregated for a specific purpose linked to luxury. For example,
China, one of the fastest growing luxury markets, is in the introductory phase
of luxury consumption and a large proportion of the wealthy and upper middle-
class members need to be educated about luxury. This market is not yet at the
stage where consumers make decisions based only on brand information and
advertisements. The products have to be presented, demonstrated, discussed
and shared before they are bought and used. This involves a kind of educational
process that should be ongoing even after the purchase has been made. This
is because it is essential to continue to reinforce the belief of the client in the
product, the brand and their manner of usage of the product. Since the Chinese
market is highly populated and has cultural features that are grounded in collec-
tivism rather than individualism, one of the best ways of sustaining this educa-
tion is through creating online communities around a luxury brand.
One company that understood these factors and effectively crafted a suc-
cessful online community strategy is Lancôme (Figure 3.15), which created
