Twitter, Facebook, tumblr, Instagram, YouTube, Livestream, not forgetting Foursquare: the top social networks and tools were all present at the major FLOW conference held in Paris on 09/24. Their reason for coming? to share best practices and social media trends with luxury brands in 2012, 2013…
Today, the challenge for all players in the fashion and luxury industries is to master these communication and engagement techniques. Indeed, we, you, the“consumaCtors“, use minute after minute, day after day, these digital media to interact and stay connected to our communities.
Tumblr hosts 74 million blogs, Foursquare has 25 million users, YouTube receives 800 million visitors every month. Facebook has nearly a billion profiles, and Twitter posts overa billion tweets every 3 days.”
Amy Cole (Vice President, Partnerships, Instagram) tells us that, with 80 million registered users, brand campaigns are becoming increasingly numerous on the photo-sharing platform.
The question today is no longer “should luxury brands invest in the digital sphere” – they’re already there. They’ve understood that digital communities are a fantastic way of getting in touch with their customers in a qualitative way. There is no longer any doubt as to the relevance of combining technology and creativity; all that remains is to constantly refine one’s communications strategy to integrate this essential social dimension.
FLOW’s speakers addressed key topics and gave concrete pointers on how to“awaken the senses and create emotion” (which was the main theme of this year’s event), “engage consumers”, “get to know your audience better” and “break free from boundaries”. Sometimes with a great deal of pragmatism, humor, secrecy, figures and examples: the presentations were all interesting, even if sometimes uneven. Indeed, some of the guests – particularly the Americans – have an uncanny talent for public speaking.
Thanks to Livestream, the conference’s partner, you can find highlights of the conference on https://new.livestream.com/flow/flow2012, giving you a glimpse of the diversity of content and points of view.
For our part, Luxsure had the pleasure of conducting a few interviews on the sidelines of the event with
- Olivier Billon, organizer of the day (also Chairman and co-founder ofYkone),
- Carla Henny de Préval, Digital Marketing Director at Yves Saint Laurent beauté,
- Céline Orjubin, Associate Director in charge of development at MyLittleParis.com
- and Paul Dupuy, VP France, TheFancy.com
Let’s start, of course, with Olivier Billon, thanks to whom we were able to attend this enriching conference. As someone who advises brands on social media issues, he wanted to introduce his clients to the platforms shaping today’s Web.
Based on the observation that conferences generally feature experts who are merely intermediaries, he decided to offer the industry this annual meeting to enable the platforms themselves to come and share their vision with brands.
This year, 300 participants from all over the world, including the US, Italy and England, represented some of the world’s leading luxury brands: Cartier, Boucheron, Hermès, Vuitton, Karl Lagerfeld, Bottega Venetta… His idea: in a short, one-day format, where everything moves very fast and you see a lot of people, like “speed-dating”, generously provide sources of inspiration for the future, with concrete cases and feedback. Whether in 15 or 30 minutes, during a mini-round table, or with a real presentation support, each speaker is free to choose what best enables him or her to share his or her vision.
According to him, to conclude, “social media will disappear”, as it becomes an important part of communication, and this essential brick will end up being naturally integrated into the other devices of the communication strategy. So we’re looking forward to FLOW’13: will we be attending the conference on digital communication for luxury brands? In any case, Olivier looks forward to seeing you at the same time and in the same place next year, as he is keen to continue welcoming brands to Paris, on the eve of Fashion Week, in the same venue that hosted Yves Saint Laurent’s men’s show.
Speaking of YSL, we had the pleasure of chatting with Carla Henny de Préval about theintense digital strategy she manages for the “beauty/parfums” part of the L’Oréal group. The couture brand, which created women’s ready-to-wear as well as the tuxedo, is known for its spirit of innovation, which it is trying to reproduce in digital.
It’s one of the few brands to have deployed a complete in-house team with all the necessary skills (webdesigner, developers, etc.) to“be at the service of the woman, the fan“, Carla tells us. Their aim is to provide ever more experience and emotion, via all digital levers, including mobile.
Surprisingly, and ironically, the social web is now leading to the real thing, at the point of sale. We now turn to the theme of digitalization, which is becoming an increasingly recurrent theme at FLOW. As Carla explains, it’s still the best way to discuss and bring emotion to consumers, via a product experience like the one here at Heathrow airport:
For the launch of its new lipstick, Yves Saint Laurent created an animation using Kinect, where travelers could “project” splashes of color onto an interactive screen. Afterwards, of course, they could share their artistic creations on Facebook: the experience had come full circle.
Afterwards, our meeting with Céline Orjubin enabled us to realize how MyLittleParis, this beautiful French start-up, has become a major media group in the digital panorama. A media group that has managed to move from a free, virtual model – for Internet users – to a paying, physical business, thanks to its MyLittleBox, which has attracted 45,000 female readers. As a result, it quickly became the leader in the subscription-based “box” market, in just 10 months following the launch of the Christmas’ box in November 2011.
MyLittleParis, and now MyLittleBox, work hand in hand with brands for each partnership. The idea is to customize each operation as much as possible, working on the narrative aspect. This unique tone, developed at MLP thanks in particular to Kanako’s drawings and her fine editorial line, creates a bond through emotion. At MLP, we don’t believe in banners, that cold, intrusive format that often repeats a visual already used in traditional advertising…
Céline tells us that the most popular format for brands at MyLittleParis is the partner email. For two reasons: the more pragmatic one is that it reaches the 900,000 people who subscribe to the daily newsletter, which is powerful, and the more strategic one is that it enables us to be 200% involved in a “story-telling” approach, which engages the reader with the brand, directly telling her its story.
Finally, the discovery of the day was presented to us by Paul Dupuy, the very young VP France of TheFancy.com, launched a few months ago in the US. You may already have heard of it, but it’s the social shopping network that’s bound to be a hit! With over 2 million users and 20,000 new registrants a day, this Web platform is trying to replicate the in-store window-shopping experience on the Internet.
This community site enables brands – of which there are now almost 1,000 – to list their products, and to take advantage of sharing, like and social recommendation functions to sell directly on TheFancy, while retaining control of their image. The site then takes 10% of sales and passes on the order details to the brand in question, like a business introducer, without acting as an intermediary, which would spoil the consumer experience.
According to Paul, the social and commercial platform has already achieved $1 million in sales in September 2012 alone: an excellent start, for a company rumored to be bought out by Apple for $500 million!
With categories soon to be extended to include media content and apps, in addition to the products and services already on offer, and with new features such as “group-gifting” (buying a gift in groups with Facebook friends, for example), as well as a Fancy box, 2000 of which were sold in 4 days, TheFancy has not finished shaking up the social web and bringing value to brands .
Oscar de la Renta (and its stunning“PR girl”), Burberry, Chanel and Cartier are just a few of the successful examples of brands that have embraced social media. The latter has succeeded in sublimating the codes associated with the Cartier myth and retracing its history, through an advertising filmentitled “L’Odyssée” (The Odyssey), previewed on the Web and racking up almost 16 million views on YouTube alone.
This magnificent few-minute opus proves once again that luxury and dreams are compatible with the virtuality and creativity of the Web. With its social dimension, these qualifiers are now synonymous with sharing and a universal, not to say accessible, emotion, too…
So let brands continue to reinvent themselves with the technologies offered by social media: they have in their hands a fantastic power of creation, discussion and innovation, to make us love and prefer their stories more and more.
Jessica Gauzi
photo credits (excluding Cartier and YSL) Ykone©
Cette publication est également disponible en : Français (French)
