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Chanting a Mantra of Substance & Transparency
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Laurent Vernhes, co-founder and CEO of the luxury travel booking site TabletHotels.com, reveals how his company is profiting from user-generated content for like-minded individuals Laurent Vernhes, co-founder and CEO of…
Over the last decade, collaborations between luxury brands and contemporary artists have gone beyond mere artistic partnerships towards a new kind of luxury branding.
PARIS – Art and fashion have always developed side by side, for fashion, like art, often gives visual expression to the cultural zeitgeist. During the 1920s, Salvador Dalí created dresses for Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiapparelli. In the 1930s, Ferragamo’s shoes commissioned designs for advertisements from Futurist painter Lucio Venna, while Gianni Versace commissioned works from artists such as Alighiero Boetti and Roy Lichtenstein for the launch of his collections. Yves Saint Laurent’s vast art collection, recently auctioned at Christie’s in Paris, testified to his great love of art and revealed the influence of a variety of artists on his own designs.
In the 1980s, relationships between luxury brands and artists were advanced when Alain Dominique Perrin created the Fondation Cartier. In the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, a book marking the foundation’s 20th anniversary, Perrin says he makes “a connection between all the different sorts of arts, and luxury goods are a kind of art. Luxury goods are handicrafts of art, applied art.”
The Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemparain building in Paris
Laurent Vernhes, co-founder and CEO of the luxury travel booking site TabletHotels.com, reveals how his company is profiting from user-generated content for like-minded individuals
Laurent Vernhes, co-founder and CEO of the luxury travel booking site TabletHotels.com, reveals how his company is profiting from user-generated content for like-minded individuals
Editorial content and social commerce are two important factors that will be driving the future of luxury, says Tablet Hotels’ Laurent Vernhes, chief executive of the luxury travel booking site cum social network.
Tablet Hotels caters to connecting audiences for whom luxury travel is about finding distinctive experiences. The brand operates based on two criteria: unique editorial content that guides the quality of each destination and reviews from its customers.
“Our customer’s average age is 40 years, and the average purchase price is for 2.5 days at $900. For our customers, luxury is about lifestyle. We leverage the lifestyle aspect as an important aspect of our brand because this is what connects and ties our audience together.”
“For instance, after a trip, users are asked to review the hotel which they booked with us and their opinion is shared with our network, this keeps like-minded users connected and the authenticity between the brand and its clients. Customers know they can rely on a trusted network of like-minded people.”
What makes the Tablet Hotels model unique is that the site is optimized with social media to enhance the lifestyle experience. It conducts contests with users making submissions for the best travel story or photograph which are then featured on the site.
“Luxury clientele either are or think of themselves as sophisticated; they like to connect with other like-minded people who also reflect these same attributes. We find that our clientele has a lot of unique experiences to share that only strengthen our brand.”
“The way we see it is: we can display content based on the key element to show who these people are. The more information users can see [about] who is behind the content and reviews, the more of a connection for the brand people build. We have a database of 800,000 people, the brand at our level is still small enough that people self filter and that there is a lot of consistency with the content. As we grow we are making sure we are not loosing track of the consistency for people to have a chance to define themselves.”
“ Transparency of the internet led to rate comparison; this means marketing today to luxury clientele is about true values and the substance of the product ”
According to Vernhes, today’s consumer has access to an insurmountable knowledge about brands and this transparency no longer supports the marketing of the kind of fantasy stories usually associated with luxury marketing. The result is that luxury brands today have to seek to provide real substance.
“In marketing, it is tempting to try to control things. Social media adds another layer of transparency because it creates venues for communication that are completely out of control – everybody can see what’s going on. But we have found success in this transparency.”
Tablet Hotels does not invest in paid media but rather has built the brand through word of mouth and relied on its proposition of transparency instead to achieve success. Despite an economy that has still not fully recovered, the company forecasts that it will receive over $80 million in gross bookings in 2010.
