Information Technology Reference
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obtain advice and information on everything from luxury living tips, luxury
brands, private jets, holiday resorts, wealth management, real estate, events
and sports. They also use the network to stay connected with friends for
pleasure and linked with contacts for business purposes.
On the blogging front, indications show that wealthy people are active blog
readers and recent research has also shown that nearly 40 percent of all blog-
gers themselves are affluent individuals who make up the luxury consumer
market. Not surprisingly, they are more likely to purchase luxury online than
non-bloggers or blog readers. These wealthy people are also using blogs for
the exchange of opinions, information, news and entertainment. The opinion
exchanges are geared towards current affairs and lifestyle topics, including
discussions about luxury brands and products. The majority of them consider
blogs to be a more reliable source of honest information about luxury brands
and products than mainstream magazines. This is evident from the more than
75 percent of wealthy blog readers who consult a blog before making a pur-
chase for a luxury item whether online or offline, while 87 percent seek brand
opinion from fellow blog readers. Of course, they do not follow the recom-
mendations made on blogs to the letter but the advice obtained from blogs
goes a long way in influencing their immediate purchase decisions and long-
term perceptions of the luxury brands and products.
As I write, the luxury sector is yet to define a clear consensus for the adop-
tion and integration of the social web's collaborative tools in a clear-cut strat-
egy. Due to the lack of sufficient capabilities at the majority of the luxury
companies and their associated agencies (see the Introduction and Chapter 4),
the common practice today is either to “watch, wait and see” or to “join the
bandwagon” either by advertising on as many social websites as possible,
without defining a marketing objective and the metrics to measure their impact
and effectiveness, or by creating social web platforms like blogs and social
networks, without necessarily understanding their rudiments and potential
impact. Several luxury brands have gone ahead to create what I would call
mostly “half-baked” corporate blogs and social networks in a bid to demon-
strate an innovative spirit or in fear that their competitors will do so before
them. These haphazard efforts have however led to a general feeling of dissat-
isfaction among luxury brands because despite several efforts the social web,
which was expected to generate positive change in everything, literally, is yet
to prove its ground-breaking results in sales turnover and market share gain.
As a medium whose appeal comes from its staggering numbers of users
(175 million monthly users of FaceBook, 200 million monthly users of
Qzone, 140 million tracked blogs etc.), the social web has been presented and
is viewed as a destination for the masses and everything that appeals to them,
which is innately different from that which luxury represents. Ironically, the
luxury sector like many other industries has been expecting the social web to
result in extraordinary sales revenues that equal the social web's mass-based
appeal but, somehow, luxury brands have expected this to happen without
