In EConsultancy and Big Mouth Media’s most recent “Social Media and Online PR Report,” 50% of companies surveyed said that they had directly contacted those within social media that had given their brand a bashing. Interestingly the survey showed that after this solution, the second most popular way to keep their brand seen in a positive light was ultimately to improve products and services, demonstrating just how powerful the collective voice is online to shaping consumer experience.

The research also showed that one area that was lacking was for brands to create their own content to offset negative consumer opinions, with only 12% of companies engaging in this solution. With brands having so much to talk about, surely this is an easy win for companies?

The research highlighted that Twitter was used to monitor brand sentiment, however Tweets from brands were used more widely as a tool for publicising new content e.g. product, service e.t.c.
A quarter of brands surveyed said that they used the micro blogging service to gather information and for customer service, an area that I feel has a huge amount of potential, especially when recruiting for and announcing winners of brand led competitions.

What is a concern is that more than 20% of the companies surveyed said that the risk of negative brand sentiment was a major influence in not creating more effective social media engagement. Surely the rewards from engaging with social media heavily well outweigh not? With benefits including; creating positive brand sentiment, SEO efficiency, audience segmentation, sentiment segmentation to name just a few, engaging with social media offers a brand so many more rewards and even if a brand isn’t engaging heavily negative views can still be aired, with the power of the collective voice as mentioned in paragraph one if you can’t beat them then you might as well join them.

The attached link runs through the most recent Luxury Lab Innovation Forum, on the state of digital within the luxury sector.

http://www.businessoffashion.com/2009/11/fashion-2-0-luxurylab-innovation-forum.html

The piece pretty much strengthens and supports much that I have written about over the last couple of years, so I won’t cover that, however there was an interesting comment by Chandler Burr at the event.
Chandler Burr is the New York Times perfume critic (what a fantastic job), basically he highlighted the fact that luxury is not about the cult of the creator but more about the individuality of the wearer/client – “It’s the difference between you wearing the perfume and the perfume wearing you.”

Now this shift in terms of what people want from their luxury brand I feel is somewhat endemic of where we are at in terms of culture. Due to the advancement of the digital age information is easy to come by and whereas in the past those that were directional and very high end had to be in the know it’s now very easy to seem informed with limited threshold barriers to information i.e. price, invites e.t.c.

By creating something that is completely bespoke or furnishing the client with as much information as possible (about the product) will provide the consumer with something to talk about, a unique experience, something that truly separates them from the pack of other very informed and uniformly directional trend setters, creating a reason to spend more on that product as it sets them apart.

Does this then highlight a potential shift in luxury products, due to the fact that luxury is being redefined? I believe so, as Chandler Burr mentions it’s about the individual wearing the product rather than following vogue and wearing what everyone else is, without being armed with the reason to why you choose that brand over another you can’t really seem that individual, informed and ultimately wearing a luxury brand for the right reason…..it’s not so great to follow anymore.

If this is the case then building a digital CRM that furnishes the customer and potential customer with as much information as possible has the potential to build the brand to luxury status? I don’t believe so; however this does highlight that luxury brands need to be in this digital space in order to maintain the brand status that they have built over the many years they have existed. Luxury brands need to offer a level of service that the individual who invests with them can only receive an exclusive club, and not someone that has just surfed the internet to find information that makes them sound informed and a luxury consumer.

Was looking into the old Freemium model this morning used by the WSJ and seemed like quite an interesting model for retailers and fashion brands. Succinctly the model offers ’social media mavens’ free content that they can blog about or socially tag, maintaining a decent SEO strategy alongside a paid for subscription model – a partnership that is not always thought of as compatible.

As more and more fashion and luxury brands are creating sites that are not just e-commerce focused and actually offer valuable and educational content, it would be possible to identify a brands social media brand advocate (social media maven) and offer a reward based scheme for covering content from within the brands site, on their blog or by social media tagging. This doesn’t necessarily have to be redeemable points in store but maybes access to exclusive events or one off pieces, to really entrench the blogger in the brand.

Not much of a shock, but definitely worth a look at: