Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 7
e-people are real
people
“The 'now' culture of the Internet (mobiles and laptops) convinced us
that if we do not have everything on our finger tips, we will immedi-
ately transform into one of these impatient, red-faced people cursing
each lost millisecond.”
—quoted from
Luxe to 2011
I am often surprised when I hear of the efforts made by luxury brands to sep-
arate online clients from offline clients. The initiatives that reflect this prac-
tice range from creating separate client management programs and systems,
segmenting client offers according to shopping channel and grouping VIP
clients not in terms of overall expenditure but from the amount spent on pur-
chases made on each sales channel. Worse yet is when the retail employees in
the physical stores compete with the managers of the online stores for clients
and sales revenue levels. This reality has led to hoarding client information,
resistance towards creating synergies in client management programs and all
manner of dysfunctional habits that contribute to the detriment of the brands
rather than their advancement.
The reality is that there is no line that separates online luxury clients with
offline consumers. In most cases, it is the same people who shop online who
are also buying in the physical stores. In fact, the first adopters of Internet
shopping in the early days of luxury e-retail were those clients who already
had established relationships with luxury brands. Their familiarity with the
brands was a natural reassurance for shopping in the virtual environment and
they were using the Internet as an extended form of their overall relation-
ship with the brands. Progressively, other groups joined the online shopping
crowd and the Internet also became a channel of brand discovery for people
to be introduced to luxury brands with which they further interacted through
shopping offline. Although online people may exhibit different characteristics
due to the specificities of the Internet, their collective behavior towards lux-
ury brands is influenced by their transferred experiences from the real world.
It is the same client shopping on the two channels and they are looking for
a uniform and coherent brand experience, which means that there should
be strong synergies between these channels and everything about client
