Luxury Retail and Digital Management, 2nd Edition

Chapter 5Putting the Customer Back in the Centre

Go into the store and look at what people are doing.

–Paco Underhill¹

Even though most brands – confronted with the new medium that is the Internet – have built their online presence by the superposition of layers, one over the other, the time has now come for luxury brands to thoroughly revamp their business model on the Web.

Over the last ten years, luxury brands have developed an online presence that is very much in line with their organisation and their standard business models, to which two or more independent, or almost independent, layers have been added:

• A ‘sales’ layer comprising boutiques, shops-in-shops in department stores, travel retail stores, online sales sites, and indirect distribution.
• A ‘communications’ layer, consisting of institutional communication, customer relationship management (CRM), a presence on social networks, and a presence on mobile apps. All these are simple tools that should be placed at the service of a global (and omnichannel) client relationship strategy.

The typical organisational chart of a luxury brand separates sales from marketing and sometimes even communication, which is the responsibility of the Creative Director. Unfortunately, this causes difficulties in creating an integrated client relationship strategy across all the services – instead of an accumulation of four strategies: communications + CRM + Internet + sales.

Running contrary to the culture that serves as reference, based ...