Information Technology Reference
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clients are.” Today, you will likely hear
“
The economic turmoil has driven
a new type of consumption online therefore we are working towards opti-
mizing our e-commerce.” While not all brands share these viewpoints, until
recently several luxury companies felt that there wasn't much more to do on
the Internet and with digital technology beyond having an attractive website
with as many images and flash animations as possible. The general consensus
has also been that there isn't
“
much” going on in cyberspace that could pos-
sibly have a consequence for the luxury business. How wrong this is!
Personally, when I heard these or similar comments, or read about them
in press articles, I was eager to dismiss them as unfounded generalizations
by outside observers of the luxury sector but I was proved wrong when I
mentioned to a highly respectable luxury executive that I was writing this
topic. His response was actually a question: “Is there really enough going on
in luxury e-business to fill a topic?” Well, I guess the response is here.
Luxury on the Internet has not come of age. In fact, luxury online, or
what some prefer to call e-luxury, is still very much in its infancy and a far
cry from the state of affairs in other industries. This is the reason for the
general consensus that there isn't enough going on in the sphere of luxury on
the Internet and that the digital world doesn't necessarily have much to offer
luxury brands beyond their websites. It is also the reason that the benchmarks
for best practices in several aspects of e-business cannot be found among
luxury brands. The unfortunate reality is also that luxury online currently
has no brand leader in a foremost position, making all brands followers and
exposing them to the challenge of drawing benchmarks from other indus-
tries that don't necessarily have the culture, values and mechanics of luxury.
For example, luxury brands have been looking up to independent e-retail-
ers like Net-A-Porter.com and Amazon.com for e-merchandizing tools and
rely on others like My-Wardrobe.com, MySpace.com and FaceBook.com for
directions in social web techniques. This major drawback however will be
overcome as luxury online evolves and benchmarks begin to emerge. One of
the key factors that will drive this is the application of effective and meaning-
ful metrics to measure the impact of digital tools in several aspects of the
luxury e-business like communications, buzz marketing, social web referenc-
ing and so on.
As I write, the luxury industry still lacks standard feasible procedures for
e-business ranging from the website design, choice of digital marketing tech-
niques suitable for different products, brands and categories, the choice of
websites for advert placements, the type of advertisements to run, the meas-
urement of online advert effectiveness, approaches to social web marketing
through blogs and online communities, the development of e-boutiques with
effective e-merchandizing, webmosphere and e-CRM tools and other e-business
dimensions. However, these challenges will eventually be overcome as several
luxury brands no longer underestimate the powerful influence that the Internet
wields, particularly in view of its increasing adoption in new markets.
