Luxury is by essence aspirational, translating consumers’ most intimate desires into exciting products and services. User-centered design, at the core of digital applications development, perfectly matches the ethos of luxury brands: it’s all about the user’s frictionless satisfaction.
Digital tools offer customization possibilities both at the most granular level and at an unprecedented scale.
Millennials and Generation Z consumers now make up over 30% of all luxury spending. More importantly, according to UBS Group AG, 18 – 35 year olds generated 85 % of growth in the luxury market last year globally and will represent 45 % of total high-end spending by 2025. If you’re a luxury brand, you need to be proactively playing where they’re playing, and doing it seamlessly.
The first reaction to the wide adoption of digital services was the fear that customers would try out and compare products in high street stores before buying them online at a cheaper price. But the recent evolution of digital habits has shown that Instagram, Pinterest and other social networks have become a new form of window shopping, educating and nurturing customers throughout the whole funnel, completed with IRL (in real life) transactions. Quite the opposite of the initial anxious hypothesis.
The time of reverse omnichannel has started—the store must match the quality of the online experience. Digital is no longer only a sales or communication channel. Instagram becomes the new store window, and digital now becomes the source of inspiration for reinventing the role of the store and the customer experience. The notion of “retail as theater,” i.e. a source of entertainment and experience, has found new relevance through Apple and Tesla, which have created cachet around the store experience.
Brick-and-mortar shops are forced to evolve. They are now part of a wider ecosystem. The convenience of online experiences has raised the bar of customers’ demands. In a world of personalized algorithmic feeds, they are now considering that a custom offer is the bare minimum they should expect from any vendor, in all situations.
Retail assistants are becoming personal shoppers. But it does not mean that their job should be harder to perform. Digital applications can release them from their most mundane tasks to allow more quality time spent serving their customers. We could argue that digital enhances the human touch of the High Street.
When designing digital applications for luxury products or services, it is crucial to deliver a level of craftsmanship that matches your clients’ attention to detail and their customers’ expectations.
The digital UX has to be consistent with the overall brand experience. In an industry driven by the highest design standards, there’s no room for a sub-par execution.
In the world of art and performance, it has long been realised that the value of the art is intrinsically linked to the context under which it is ‘consumed’. For example, there is a rapid drop in the perceived value of a concert which is performed on the street versus a symphony hall. This concept has been described as ‘art without a frame’. The consumption experience around luxury retail has the same requirement for the frame. The frame helps create the value. They go hand in hand. For luxury brands, the physical experience has always been the core of that frame (beautiful flagships, religious experiences). The ability to touch-and-feel the product, the relationship consumers have with staff, and in particular the knowledge and service that sales associates provide, are all part of that frame. But as the frame itself becomes increasingly digital, luxury brands must consider what bold, innovative, and luxurious approaches can be adopted, balanced against protecting the core and the heritage of the brand.
The visual assets used in digital projects also have to be outstanding. For most interactive applications, you will need detailed 3D models of your products, which you can now create using HD videos with a tool like Cappasity (see the embedded example).
Applications are by no means limited to iOS and Android mobile apps. Digital solutions can include 360° immersive experiences, AR/VR interactive applications, the use of sensors, beacons, connected objects, RFID and NFC tags, AI-powered personalization, messaging chatbots and other forms of conversational marketing.
There’s almost no limit to what can be achieved by a team of creative engineers.
Innovative techniques can also be combined. There can be multiple entry points to the same back end. You can for instance query a database via a voice prompt using Alexa / Google Home / Apple HomePod or engage in a text conversation using Messenger or Whatsapp, via a simple decision tree or NLP (natural language processing) or simply interact through a dedicated visual UI, all plugged to the same dataset.
In order to leverage the wealth of data collected in an omnichannel commerce environment, digital applications have to be properly integrated with CRM, ERP and other enterprise tools, via existing or custom integrations (APIs, webhooks,…).
All solutions have to be modular, adapted to the product, the context and the experience you want to deliver. We absolutely do not believe there is one store of the future. There will be 1,000 stores of the future. Think about the way a brand commissions an interior designer and differentiates the space, the smell, the experience, the merchandising. What we do not want is cookie-cutter experiences. So some components will be suitable for some brands and not for others.
Digital experiences perfectly address the need to attract customers to high street stores, in a variety of ways:
A few years ago it was impossible to seamlessly blend reality with fiction or to fully immerse yourself in a virtual world. Today AR and VR offer a wide range of interactive opportunities which enable us to recreate any environment anywhere in the world. Your imagination is the limit.
AR (Augmented Reality) is the real-time superimposition of information (text, graphics, audio and other virtual enhancements) on real-world elements (people, objects).
You can for instance use AR to display a virtual watch on someone’s wrist or to design a virtual changing room with a smart mirror, which maintains the relationship between the sales person and the customer during the whole fitting process.
AR – also called “mixed reality” – can be experienced either via a screen blending your image with virtual elements or via the camera of a casual smartphone or the use of special goggles (e.g. Microsoft Hololens or Magic Leap).
Here’s an example of AR enabling you to wear a virtual luxury watch (Jaeger-Lecoultre).
VR (Virtual Reality) is quite different. It’s a fully immersive experience which ideally requires the use of a dedicated headset (e.g. Oculus (Quest, Rift, Go), HTC Vive) or rudimentary smartphone-based systems like Google cardboard VR.
VR applications transport the user in a fully controlled environment where everything is possible. VR sets can be either fully made up (like in a video game) or use 360° real world photospheres.
We would advise AR to customize real world objects (e.g. browse all the variations of a luxury watch) and/or enhance reality with virtual assets (e.g. fitting room concept, virtual product display in a shop window at night) while using VR when the experience requires a full immersion: the sneak preview of a concept car, the visit of exclusive apartments yet to be built, the instant teleportation to the most remote places on earth (and beyond), etc.
By definition, there’s no limit to what you can achieve with Virtual Reality.
Here’s a virtual visit of a real exclusive penthouse in Las Vegas.
Discover Hamilton Island (Australia) in this 360° video.
Nno headset needed. You can move around with your mouse (or fingers on mobile).
Online search patterns have evolved from a few keywords typed into the search bar of Google to properly phrased questions now asked in natural language, in writing and also vocally, via the search assistants embedded in most smartphones (Siri on iOS / Google Assistant on Android) or the latest smart speakers like Amazon Echo, Google Home or Apple HomePod.
Customers now expect leading brands to deploy technologies which can answer their questions 24/7, on all devices. For luxury brands, investing in effective search assistants is undoubtedly a smart move.
Luxury brands have multiple types of digital needs, both in terms of external and internal communication. Used in a B2C context, online or in-store, digital applications will provide practical information (catalogue, availability,…) and enhance the customer experience. They are also the perfect shrine for a VIP loyalty programme.
In a B2E / HR context, mobile applications are an effective learning medium, enabling luxury brands to train and motivate their sales teams. Digital applications can help brands ensure that their sales assistants will always be reliable experts.
Branded digital applications can be interconnected with the existing communication tools used by sales assistants and customers alike, adding a layer of knowledge, security and brand-safety. While it’s great to leverage consumer-grade messaging apps to remove the friction of proprietary tools and facilitate customer relationships, it’s essential to ensure the quality and tone of voice of all outbound messages: there’s nothing worse than a chat thread dedicated to a luxury brand plagued with technical errors or spelling mistakes.
Blockchain technologies enable manufacturers to set up publicly available immutable ledgers which can help certify the authenticity of luxury items and follow them through their whole lifecycle, even when they change owners.
RFID tags or other digital identifiers can be built into each product to guarantee its unicity via a forgery-proof digital certificate of authenticity. It’s the most efficient way to detect counterfeit products in a snap!
The info stored via a decentralized blockchain can also include the essential components of the product and other data from the supply chain to guarantee a consistent quality of the execution.
Moreover blockchain technologies can allow the tokenization of assets in multiple shares between various owners, opening new business opportunities in the luxury sharing economy (example: Tend, CH) .
Exclusive cars can be tokenized using the blockchain, creating a new luxury sharing economy.
Herein after you’ll find a few words and concepts traditionally associated with “luxury” which should be part of any exclusive brand’s digital vocabulary.
Taking these notions into account in your creative & tech brief is the first requirement to claim a share of your affluent customers’ highly coveted attention.
How many boxes do you tick in your digital execution?
How could you improve your performance?
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