Luxury And Social media: Friend Or Foe?
As most of you know, I do not come from the horology industry. Far from it. My background is in technology and software engineering. When I catapulted into the luxury industry, I knew absolutely nothing about it – besides being an avid consumer – and naively assumed that if social media worked for enterprise software, how different could it be for luxury watches? Answer: very!
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Having worked in the luxury industry as a community and social media manager for a year now, I’ve come to an interesting conclusion. Social media is both a saving grace and a trojan horse for the luxury industry.
It all depends on the brand, its size, and its evolutionary stage. For large established “umbrella brands”, social media represents a clear and present danger. Why? Because these brands have built their strength on mystique,
secrecy, and exclusivity. What’s more, part of their allure is the difficulty inherent in “touching” them – otherwise, they wouldn’t be “exclusive” would they? If you throw social media in that mix, you’re lobbing a grenade inside a bunker. Social media is all about transparency, openness, bi-directional communication and accessibility. Talk about orthogonal concepts. What’s more, it’s not even clear – in my mind anyway – that luxury customers of these brands even yearn to be heard. I think deep down, they enjoy the S&M aspect of traditional luxury brand “service”.
Sometimes abuse is just heroin chic 
Now, for the smaller brands, for the independents, the reborn brands, and the startups, it’s an entirely different landscape. These guys don’t have the deep pockets required to do carpet bombing marketing. For them, guerrilla marketing makes sense. Especially if they are addressing mass markets. And even if not, establishing thought leadership in their field can be motivation enough to leverage social media networks. Unhindered by large corporate ownerships, the smaller, newer guys have more freedom. More desire to get up close and personal with the customer. And more ability to be transparent – within reason.
The Final Word
Having worked both sides of the fence, I am nowadays much more careful about advising clients. Because sometimes, the best thing you can do for a brand’s strategy is suggest they change absolutely nothing.
To see more from Jerome check out his official website: www.jeromepineau.com
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The social media manager is only another “PR manager”, but for final customers for high-end watch brands !
Hi @Jacques – Not sure what you mean?
Hi Jérôme,
It seems to be very difficult for a social media manager in a high-end brand to comunicate with transparency and frankness.
@Jacques – well again, I think it depends on a lot of things – not the least of which is your definition of “high-end” – actually that’s a really good topic for discussion! What’s your definition?
Great topic, Jerome. Really opens up key topics of concern: if you’re a coy girl flirting with your audience and banking on your mystique, how much do you open your robe? I figured the analogy went well with the heroine chic and carpet bombing.
Sorry, my english is not so good, I mean for exemple brands belonging to luxury groups as Richemond, PPR, LVMH.
Great article Jerome and apologies for commenting well after you published.
Assuming all luxury brands want to somehow embrace the social media bandwagon, I think the question is not so much whether social media is a good or a bad thing for the luxury sector, but rather how brands approach it and integrate it into their own very specific communications mix.
Just like with all aspects of communication, if the methodology is misjudged, then the robe that Meehna mentions above will inevitably fall open and all hope of retaining any dignity, let alone mystique, is lost. Just ask Bernie
The ability to judge the right amount of skin to reveal is the art of the social media manager, and yet as this person is often the only one in the company to fully understand just how difficult it is to strike a balance between the dynamics of corporate governance in big name brands and the demands of the customers once you’ve opened the floodgates of information, at times, his operational territory falls squarely into a no man’s land of indecision and – worse – inaction, undermining the whole point of wearing the robe in the first place. Here I believe is the point Jaques is making.
Small brands as you rightly point out are far more lithesome and can act almost without constraint online, putting them instantly on a one-to-one level with their social media audience and giving them a huge advantage over the bigger, more cumbersome players in the process.
But the question remains the same: how do you approach social media?
Big brands make may grab all the headlines online, but they are often far less “open” than their Facebook page or blog makes them out to be (I know one client who has to approve every comment on Facebook), which means that with only a little knowledge of online marketing, combined with a healthy dose of determination, the smaller brands can not only secure their own chunk of the market, but can even take away some of the lion’s share for themselves.
Hey @Michael, thanks for the insight – I have to say however I don’t quite agree with “The ability to judge the right amount of skin to reveal is the art of the social media manager” – Unless the person has been in the industry and/or company a long long time, this filtering is often beyond our means because we may often lack important information – so it’s important to consult with other team members clearly but also essential IMHO is a clear set of directives from the beginning about what is “releasable” or not.
That being said, I would be weary of any entity coming up with a substantial list of such items – if that were the case, I would seriously ask them to consider whether they really want to (or understand) what it means to get into social media. What exactly is it these folks need to hide anyway? To me that’s the 1st question a client needs to ponder.
@Jerome, We are, I think, saying the same thing: the way I see it, a social media manager understands what’s needed to ignite the conversation online (his art) but is often powerless to do so with the information and freedom he’s given to work with (his context).
Part of the responsibility of the social media manager should – and this is definitely IMHO – be aimed “inwards” and not just towards building the “outside” community. He (or she) should be given the necessary instruments to strike the balance I mentioned, as if it cannot be reached it’s never going to work anyway as the commitment to openness, and coherency between words and actions simply won’t be there. That’s why smaller brands are at such an advantage when it comes to social media.
At the end of the day, hiding and revealing are two parts of the eternal debate between controlling Vs. engaging with customers and you’re dead right to demand clarity from your customers before staring out with them.
But I’m curious about your final sentence: “sometimes, the best thing you can do for a brand’s strategy is suggest they change absolutely nothing”. Now that’s definitely a conversation worth having…
@Michael – what I meant is that sometimes a “do nothing” approach is also appropriate. Social media is not always a necessity, but more often an opportunity (as Gary Vaynerchuk preaches, rightly so). Beware the social media zealots
Oh I’m with you 100% on that one. Would make for an excellent post, n’est-ce pas?
But then I’d have all the zealots on my ass and that’s kinda heavy
Is “do nothing” really an option for anyone Jérôme when you audience/potential clients have moved away from where you traditionally influence them? The massive advertising budgets of luxury brands will be wasted if they stick to diminishing media like magazines and newspapers when their potential clients are forming their buying decisions from friends and comments on Facebook etc.
I believe that brands do need a presence on social media as it is essentially mainstream media now. That’s doing something. It’s the type of presence that needs to be consider, i.e. from just advertising or monitoring to being fully engaged. What is less discussed is that there is no social community management without a community and communities form around interesting and original content and discussing it.
A Blog, Twitter feed or a Facebook page isn’t likely to be a community in itself – even though they can take a lot of management – but they may be part of a wider community and they do enable the brand to touch and perhaps even influence those people.
To succeed in the medium/long term, doing nothing isn’t an option, but I do agree that it’s pointless for any brand to dive in head first when dipping their feet in the water may be a better first step.
Thanks for the comment @Ian. I agree about communities forming around interesting/original content. More so than that, see point #8 of my post here: http://goo.gl/ZdTcD – It’s not every watch brand that can rally around an ideal or a cause.
In my opinion yes it is better, cheaper and less time consuming to do nothing vs. simply machine gunning press releases on twitter or FB. So to me doing nothing is a valid option until you find a compelling reason to change tack. Otherwise you’re just polluting the bandwidth
But I also agree it’s not a valid long-term strategy. Problem is you can’t just whip up a community around an ideal or cause just like that. Nor can you suddenly care about customer relationships over night – that’s something deeply entrenched in a brand’s DNA (at least in my experience) and yes you can be dragged screaming and kicking into it, but long term, it will show you’re just going through the motions.
I don’t understand why the only options should be “Do Nothing” or “Develop a Community”, especially as here are practically no brands with their own community besides (and I am not saying this list is exclusive), Rolex, Panerai, and Vacheron Constanin (Hour Lounge). Most are tapping into the broader watch community or subsets thereof . . . as they should be.
Social media is just that, another media, and while you can do more with it than traditional media, i.e interact with audiences, that does not mean that if you cannot do that, or don’t want to, that you should ignore it.
If somebody wants to stay in touch with a brand via Facebook or Twitter, why not give them that option? Just like RSS feeds or subscribing to Newsletters? It is practically no work or effort to use social media as another distribution channel. And it’s “opt in” so nobody is getting spammed. It’s where your audience is ever more likely to be so why not use it in whatever way you can?
If there is a downside I don’t see it.
Hi @Ian – I was only trying to make the point that unless you are going to use social media for what it is meant for – which is building relationships with your customers, then it may not be worth the hassle to crowd the bandwidth with yet more PR marketing junk “just because you can”. If you are not fundamentally into really communicating with your customers and fans, and in a 2-way mode, not fundamentally ready, willing and able to open the kimono and be transparent, and not fundamentally ready to change in the way you approach business, then perhaps the effort is moot or, at the very least, you might just hire a couple intern to post your stuff on the new channels. I don’t think there are people clamoring for more push marketing junk on FB or Twitter just because they happen to be on there. People have been pushed to aggressively for decades now. They’re tired. If you’re not going to be genuinely engaged in building real relationships with them, I don’t think they’re interested in reading yet another press release just because it happens to be on Facebook (or fill in the newest coolest SNS…).
Just because your audience happens to be on Facebook as opposed to TV doesn’t mean the season’s open on them on that media
So I guess I would disagree with your statement that “social media is just that, another media” – it’s not about the new tools or channels, it’s about a new way of doing business. Just my opinion
Hugh MacLeod put it succinctly when he came up with “it’s not what the software does, it’s what the user does” (http://bit.ly/1akCDc) – in other words you as a brand (aka commercial interest) *should* move where your audience/potential clients are, no matter what technological hoops you end up having to jump through. Up to here Ian, you’re right on the nail.
That does not mean, as Jerome points out, that just because half the world’s on Facebook right now then all brands both mainstream and otherwise should be too. That way of thinking’s got nothing at all to do with the customer and everything to do with carpet bombing which builds very little value for the brand long term.
Every social medium has it’s own distinctive intellectual level (DNA?) and as a result attracts specific levels of brand/audience interaction – seen any decent YouTube comments recently? It’s whether those levels of interaction build or in some way demystify and therefore dilute your brand value that Jerome is rightly pointing to when he suggests reflection.
When you say “It is practically no work or effort to use social media as another distribution channel.” you’re actually way off the mark as real engagement – one-on-one relationships which social media allows and was designed to provide, is seriously delicate work for the social media manager as things can turn nasty in minutes. Just ask Nestlé (http://bit.ly/dxJfou), not to mention Hublot’s recent foray off the beaten path…
The biggest error any brand can make is simply leaping into the social media arena without some sort of plan that can be ramped up when specific objectives are reached, which is why any half decent online social media manager will *first* have a close look at the brand’s value proposition, its positioning, its current online activities, its target audience and of course its commercial objectives long and hard and *then* come up with a plan to put all this into action.
Personally FB is bottom of my to-do list as it reaps the lowest tangible returns but there again, that’s just my $0.02…
Michael, my experience is with niche high end watch brands, and Facebook reaps by far the highest return on investment by any metric I’ve measured. For bang for buck and quality of the brand/audience interaction, Facebook is a hands down winner.
Jerome, I am not at all disagreeing that social media can be, and should be, so much more that a new place to post press releases. And that to maximise the potential of social media, a brand has to change its old mind set, open its doors and let the light flood in.
But as we both know, even if a brand is willing to do just that – and that’s a big if – finding the resources in people and money can be another major hurdle.
While you might feel – and I would agree with you – that a brand using Twitter and Facebook to just publish or link to press releases, news letters, and perhaps the odd article or Blog post, is as much a waste as using a Ferrari for the school run, hey, why walk?
Bear in mind that nobody on Facebook or Twitter is going to get pissed off at the brand because the only people who receive the publicity are those that have opted in. Just like people subscribe to Newsletters, RSS feeds, and sign up to receive brand press releases by emails.
There is no downside I can see and advantages are that 1. The brand gets to dip a toe in the social media pool before plunging in, and 2. If/when they do decide at some future stage to take the plunge, they will already have a base audience to interact with.
And one more major reason to have at least a minimum presence on the major social media channels: if you do not register your Twitter name and Facebook url, somebody else will (and probably sell replicas).
Just over 10 years ago there were still luxury brands reluctant to have a website as it was considered “tacky”. Luxury was something you held and touched, not looked at on a screen. What happened? They had to spend a fortune on buying their domain names back or pay IP lawyers to try and get them back.
Doing nothing is not an option. Doing a bare minimum is.
And yes, even better is embracing it all.
Hey Ian, great discussion, thanks – couple points more:
“Bear in mind that nobody on Facebook or Twitter is going to get pissed off at the brand because…”
- agreed; it’s more a question of ignoring the brand I’m concerned with. If you get pissed at me (as a brand I mean) then you are engaged. To me that’s an opportunity to turn you into a friend/supporter – and it’s a lower cost acquisition than going after someone who simply doesn’t care. Same is true for political figures actually.
Point being: if you don’t wow people, simply going subliminal on them is not very compelling IMHO. It’s OK to love or hate a brand. It’s those in the middle that are problematic IMHO – In our line of work, gray is bad
As for staking out brand identities on the SM networks, that I support indeed! You’re right about the hassle of legalities that can ensue from neglecting that (actually I had a client recently with that very same problem – a major pain in the ass for SEO!)
In either case, there is nothing to lose by establishing accounts on the major networks, you are correct of course – even if you leave them idle for a while. Nor is there a major problem just using those channels for classic PR pushing, if that’s what floats their boat. I just think it’s pollution in many ways
– One should stick to what one does best sometimes.
Yes this is a great discussion and it’s a pleasure to meet you Ian. I myself am from a myriad of marketing backgrounds. Mostly technology (which is where FB really hurts) and now also luxury goods.
I’m glad we come to this discussion from slightly different angles as it makes damned good reading for everyone else. In fact, let me go on the record as saying that I find your line “For bang for buck and quality of the brand/audience interaction, Facebook is a hands down winner” an absolute gem as it will hopefully be enough to encourage those brands who are still uncertain about whether or not to jump in, to finally sit down and actually do something.
My personal experience with Facebook is that it is inhabited by an overwhelmingly large number of trolls (http://bit.ly/IZPUs) as the transaction costs of responding to posts are so low. It’s not as bad as YouTube but close.
So in terms of community building from a luxury watch brand’s perspective, I would weigh up the Pros and Cons of joining Facebook alone very carefully as the ROIs are not as convincing to me as they obviously are to you.
Having said that, your Underthedial page (http://on.fb.me/3KUPvz) is an excellent example of Facebook done right, and hats off to you, but it’s not always that easy for brands to find the same passion, both in terms of quality content from the brand itself (Jerome’s PR feed concern) as well as a passionate community ready to add value to the conversation/relations. Actually, here’s a question for you: was building that reputation, that authority and that community “easy”?
But this discussion isn’t about a single social network, rather whether or not to start and in this respect I couldn’t agree more with you.
In fact, if anyone reading this is now worried that their brand name might be taken, I recommend you head over to http://namechk.com and make sure you follow Ian’s advice before it’s too late!
Fantastic discussion guys!! As Michael has pointed out there is a lot that us “outsiders” can learn from all the insightful comments above. I really do appreciate you taking the time out to share your thoughts from your collectively vast sets of experiences!
Keep it coming!!
Hi Michael and Jerome, Michael’s question, Was building that reputation, that authority and that community “easy”?, brought up anything point worth pontification on. I first started creating (hopefully interesting) content – text, photos and little videos – in my niche area (independent watchmaking) years ago for watch discussion forums. It’s easily forgotten now that Facebook and Twitter are so hot that internet discussion forums were probably the first significant social media and that they host very vibrant communities that require substantial management. And they are real communities, a term I think that is very loosely used these days to include any interactive discussion (like this one).
For myself, just like for any brand, the main work and expense is in creating the content (photos, articles, posts, video, press releases, newsletters, etc). Once you have gone to the effort of creating that content, it makes sense to distribute it as widely as possible and for me Facebook and Twitter just became new channels to use. I have always been used to interactive discussions on forums, and in real life meetings (which happen ever more frequently), so Facebook and Twitter were more a technically learning experience rather than requiring any change of mind set.
Brands create expensive and often high quality content as well, and no matter how deeply they embrace social media, it’s a no brainer to me that they shouldn’t take advantage of using social media distribution channels that can rteach so many for so little outlay.
I share Jerome’s frustration that it is a shame not to use the full power of interactive social media, but we know just how hard that is to do properly, and in my field anyway, I see precious few people with a deep understanding of both the brand, social media and the importance of developing a fully integrated communication strategy.
And as great as it this digital communication is, it’s nothing to chatting face to face over a glass or two!
@Ian – agreed that “old school” forums are powerful communities on their own in the watch world. I was surprised to discover how tight and structured they were when I first dipped a toe in the industry. This format has more or less disappeared in other industries I believe. I quickly realized that there were 3 or 4 very powerful horology forums. It’s no coincidence why a guy like JC Biver was one of the first industry figures to leverage them to his advantage. He realized their power a long time ago – long before “social media” was even coined
As for the up close & personal chatting over a glass or two, I hope to have that chance with you at GTE coming up – we must definitely hook up
Best,
J.