Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
and richness. If a brand hasn't yet recognized the importance of the Internet
and doesn't believe in its power to inform, influence and reinforce, then
the brand shouldn't go ahead with developing a website because it will be
apparent through the website that the brand is online for the sake of it or for
wrong reasons. If you make a quick tour of cyberspace and visit up to ten
luxury brands' websites in a row, you will quickly be able to tell which web-
sites were built with passion, knowledge and dedication to ensure a strategic
online positioning. And by being online I don't mean registering the domain
name and creating a one-page “coming soon” placeholder.
The definition of the strategic goal of being online leads luxury brands to
take the basic and necessary steps towards their online presence. For exam-
ple, only brands that are committed to using the multi-purpose functions of
the Internet would think of registering variations of their domain name in
several text combinations and characters. These are the brands that would
buy such domain names as champagne.com and cognac.com in addition to
their brands' domains. These are also the brands that would go as far as buy-
ing the .com, .eu, .fr, .it, .co.uk, .hk, .jp, .in, .ru, .cn, .au, .net, .br, .me, etc.
combinations with their brand names. It is also these brands that will under-
stand that domain names could also be registered in other text characters, and
not only in Latin. Since 2008, it has been possible to register domain names
in Chinese characters. If you're a luxury brand reading these lines, you know
what to ask yourself. Also don't forget Greek, Russian, Bulgarian, Japanese,
Arabic and other languages that have non-Latin written characters.
Step two: ensuring the right internal orientation
I'd like to come back to the point I made earlier about establishing a team of
professionals with inter-disciplinary skills to ensure an expert approach to the
development of the winning luxury website. This can only be successful if
the orientation across all the departments within the internal set-up is attuned
to the reception of innovation, which the Internet represents. Although the
popular belief in the tech world is that luxury brands dislike the Internet and
the employees of luxury companies are more inclined to resist the Internet
culture than accept it (which I don't entirely agree with anyway), every com-
pany in every sector has needed at some point to re-orientate their internal
team towards the requirements of new technologies. The luxury sector is no
different. The Internet team cannot function in isolation from other depart-
ments and will often need to call on the creative directors, the product man-
agers, the brand managers, human resources directors, the retail developers
and the marketing intelligence directors. All of these parties do not need to
be technology-savvy but they will have to be knowledgeable about the busi-
ness opportunities that the Internet provides and believe in it enough to pro-
vide the required support to the Internet team. Whether it is through training
sessions, workshops, seminars, simulations or whatever dissemination means
