Casey Hall, Asia Correspondent at The Business of Fashion and Jacques Roizen, Senior Vice President & China General Manager at Pandora examined how brands continue to inspire engagement and reactivate consumers in the Chinese market.
EVENTS
[Video] LS Keynote Shanghai 2020: Engaging and Reactivating Consumers in China
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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
Casey Hall, Asia Correspondent at The Business of Fashion and Jacques Roizen, Senior Vice President & China General Manager at Pandora examined how brands continue to inspire engagement and reactivate consumers in the Chinese market.
A newly-released luxury study from Bain & Company in collaboration with Fondazione Altagamma revealed that the global personal luxury market collapsed by over 23 per cent this year (at current exchange rates) due to COVID-19 – and is now valued at about €217 billion down from last year’s €281 billion. To date, Mainland China is the only region to have recorded growth in 2020. And as the market continues to regain momentum, Chinese consumers are expected to account for nearly half the total luxury market by 2025.
At the recent Luxury Society Keynote in Shanghai, Casey Hall, Asia Correspondent at The Business of Fashion and Pandora’s Senior Vice President & China General Manager, Jacques Roizen, weighed in on what can be done to engage and reactivate consumers in this fast developing market. International global brands looking to penetrate the Chinese market need to develop specific digital strategies as consumers in China are entirely different from ones in the West.
For instance, e-commerce platforms in the West might be very focused on the transactional element, but Chinese platforms tend to serve a wider range of purposes: “Tmall and [other] marketplaces are not just e-commerce platforms, they are also marketing platforms,” said Roizen. As such, brands need to enrich their content assets and strengthen the brand narrative on such platforms in order to cater to their audiences. “That’s what brands have been doing very well on their traditional .com, so it’s just a question of figuring out what portion of that content needs to be re-distributed on Tmall,” he added.
The discussion also included this year’s hot topic: Livestreaming. The two main models used in livestreaming today were explored – one for generating awareness on big platforms like Tmall, and the other specifically for targeting existing consumers on brand-owned channels like WeChat. According to Roizen, the latter can better showcase the brand and its products by reaching customers who are already familiar with the brand and have the appetite to purchase, resulting in a higher conversion rate and better returns on investment.
Other points of interest in the fireside chat include the differences when it comes to omnichannel strategies in the West and China, as well as the types of “digital entertainment” that sophisticated digital natives in China expect from their online experiences. Watch the full interview in the video below:
Editor, Luxury Society
Before joining Luxury Society, Alexander was a business journalist covering M&A, finance, technology and marketing strategy at Women’s Wear Daily. He contributed articles to Financial Times, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, WSJ. Magazine and other media regularly as well. Alexander is also Research Director at DLG China.
