Luxury Brands selling directly on WeChat: new trend or opportunistic approach?
On 1st August, Dior has launched a ‘Customized Lady Dior Small’ campaign on the Chinese Valentine’s Day. The campaign from 1st to 4th August focused on the online product launch, while offline product launch, on the other hand, started from 4th August onwards.
According to Baidu News, 200 Lady Dior Small Handbags, priced at 28,000RMB, were sold out within 36 hours after the campaign has launched.
What Is the Significance of This Campaign?
WeChat E-commerce has rarely been a strong sales channel for luxury brands. For customers, the main point of sales and contact has largely been at the physical stores and boutiques to control and ensure the quality of the experience and the retail atmosphere. Luxury brands avoid E-commerce, a mass market channel, in fear of ‘lowering’ their high-end brand positioning that they have built up.
Dior is the one of the first main luxury brands to sell their product not just directly on WeChat, but also earlier than the launch in their physical stores. The complete online shopping experience which included paying by the WeChat wallet or Alipay, is a step further ahead than Cartier’s event last year, which required customers to pay a deposit and still visit the physical stores to collect the product.
What Does the Post Data Tell Us?
Here we can see that the read count of articles spiked after the launch of the campaign. The read count on the main article was 19768 on 31st July, and it shot up to 36695 on 1st August on the day the campaign was launched. This shows a that the campaign through WeChat has successfully driven traffic to their WeChat official account.
Furthermore, from the above picture, we can also see the huge peak in the reading trend for Dior, with an example of the media content about Dior shared on WeChat.
What’s Next?
One may be reminded of the groundbreaking move by Burberry, where an official Burberry TMall shop was opened. This move spawned the creation of many other official TMall E-commerce by other premium or luxury brands, such as Coach. Despite the success of T-Mall for luxury brands, adaptation of WeChat channels for sales, when it comes to the premium industry, remain slow.
The question is, will the Dior initiative draw interest from other luxury brands in using WeChat as a main sales channe, just like Burberry did for the Tmall platform in the past, or will this initiative remain a case-by-case, or an opportunistic basis?
What do you think?
Do you think that following Dior, WeChat would become a regular, official sales channel for luxury brands just like Tmall, or will it just be an opportunistic approach to sell luxury products to compensate the weaker traffic into the retail stores?
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