Digital advances are revolutionising the way we do business in all industries. The luxury industry can’t ignore this paradigm shift.
To help you navigate among the technologies on offer, we’ve decided to list innovative ways digital can bring value to luxury brands.
We will regularly update this article when we’ll come across exciting use cases. We’re mentioning a non exhaustive list of the tech at work for each suggestion. You will notice a common thread weaving through most of the examples, at all stages of the user journey: a strong emphasis on personalised customer experiences.
Tech
Mobile app, chatbots, voice assistants
Search is now question-driven. Users want a quick frictionless access to information. You can provide a wealth of information via chatbots and voice assistants embedded in your mobile applications, fully embracing the Age of Assistance.
Tech
AR
We’ve detailed in another article how mixed reality can enable you to offer an interactive storefront 24/7, even after removing for the night all the expensive items from your shelves.
Tech
VR
While AR can help you keep your physical storefront engaging 24/7, VR can offer a fully immersive shopping experience, where you’ll control every pixel of the interaction, using either fully virtual assets or a mix of 360° footage and virtual objects. VR Showrooms can include a conversational / social component, to replicate in virtual reality the effectiveness of in-person customer service.
The 360° format can also be used for other purposes: 360° (photospheres) posts on Facebook and on dedicated platforms (e.g. Round.me), 360° videos on Youtube, etc. It’s quickly becoming a standard discovery approach for most high end products & services.
Tech
AR, 3D scanner
Using Augmented Reality, you can offer in-store smart mirrors to your customers to help them try on clothes, shoes, accessories or even make up. Coupled with a 3D body scanner, this type of technology can take accurate measurements to craft tailor-made apparel.
Tech
Blockchain, NFC
Attaching a NFC tag registered on a blockchain to each item ensures the authenticity of your products, which can be tracked from manufacturing to sales and even resales. This is a great way to detect counterfeit items.
Tech
Mobile app, web, NFC, QR code, AR,…
Long gone are the days when customers had to keep a huge collection of loyalty plastic cards in their wallets. You can now offer the convenience of a digital loyalty card which can be connected to your POS systems via NFC, QR codes or even Augmented Reality (with a dynamic trigger recognition). Loyalty rewards are seamlessly granted to your customers based on their purchases or even on their in-store behaviour. Loyalty ecards are of course also connected to your online presence, incremented by your users’ checkouts or other custom events.
Tech
Payment processing
State-of-the art payment solutions, both online and in-store seamlessly blend the transactional and loyalty experience. Mobile devices add an extra level of security for online identification purposes.
Tech
Mobile app, web
Gamification techniques can be smartly leveraged in any commercial context, depending on your business objectives. You can create your own Candy Crush (Harrods Stiletto Wars), Pokemon Go, Quizz, photo or video apps to foster an entertaining connection with your audience. It is a very engaging form of content marketing.
Tech
Mobile app, beacon
You can attach beacons to specific shop areas to share tailor-made information while your customers are browsing the alleys of your store. This can be purely informative or part of a gamified experience.
Tech
AR
Tou can leverage Augmented Reality to superimpose a 3D virtual object to any trigger. This can be used for instance to display an infinite variety of watch faces on a physical bracelet, or even a full 3D watch on someone’s wrist. The difference with the previous virtual try on example being here that you don’t need a mirror to superimpose things which can be seen through the lens of your smartphone: watch faces, rings, shoes,…
Tech
3D imagery, AR / VR
Today you can easily create 3D models of all your products, which can be used as virtual objects in Augmented or Virtual Reality applications. They can also be used on e-commerce website, along with the usual static images & videos. See an example on our previous blog post.
Tech
3D printing
3D printing is a cost/time-efficient way of prototyping new models, including for luxury brands.
Tech
AR, VR, Mobile App, Voice Assistants, Chatbots
Virtual Reality enables you to offer an immersive training experience to your sales teams 24/7 wherever they are located in the world, using affordable headsets like the untethered Oculus Quest. This scalable approach can be integrated within a LMS (Learning Management System), accessible both on the web and via a dedicated mobile application, to facilitate on-the-go micro learning.
Augmented Reality applications can also be part of your educational suite, adding an information layer on top of the in-store environment.
Voice assistants and text-based (AI-powered) chatbots can complement the tech stack, acting as always-on knowledge concierges.
Tech
Marketplaces, Messaging apps
There’s a wide range of digital outlets where you can promote or distribute your luxury products, beyond your own website / mobile application. Many luxury brands are now leveraging the reach of messaging applications such as WeChat or Facebook Messenger to connect with potential customers, in a conversational context.
According to a report by Gartner L2 (2019), 60% of the major fashion luxury brands have at least one WeChat store (from 36% in 2018) .
Niche vertical marketplaces are also a distribution channel to be considered. Using specialised distribution gateways you can now easily expand your commercial footprint at a small additional cost.
Tech
ML, AI
With your prospects’ and consumers’ consent, you can collect a huge amount of data points about the user journey. Thanks to advances in Machine Learning / Artificial Intelligence, you can now make better sense of all this data to personalise your customer services, which can be delivered via all the digital channels at your disposal (chatbots, voice assistants, your website, your mobile app).
Tech
ML, AI, Web, Mobile app
Facial recognition, an application of machine learning, can be used to provide personalised beauty advice, based on a simple photo uploaded by the end-user (example: Sephora’s Visual Artist).
Tech
ML, AI, Web, Mobile app
Reverse image search is a great service you can offer to your customers thanks to the advances in computer vision. They can shoot an item on-the-go or upload an image to easily find a product in your catalogue. Farfetch calls it “See it, Snap it, Shop it!”.
Tech
SaaS
Tech
SaaS
Specialised SaaS tools give you the possibility to create and distribute multimedia content simultaneously at an unprecedented scale on a wide variety of channels. You can produce hyper targeted personalised videos, design an unlimited amount of static and animated display ads variations, annotate or repurpose your content.
A Digital Asset Management Software (DAMS) gives your team members quick access to relevant content at all times.
Digital marketing gives you almost instant reports about the macro and granular effects of your campaigns.
