#LUXURY: 3 ways high fashion brands use Instagram to their advantage
By 2014, 75% of luxury shoppers were using social media (Blackstone Digital Agency). A trend that was first seemed as alarming by high fashion clothing brands relying on exclusivity has transformed into an excellent opportunity to build up engagement and brand awareness. That is, if you can blend heritage with hashtags.
Instagram remains the number one channel for retailers to engage consumers (L2 Think Tank). By this day, a vast majority of old luxury brands have established and grew their social media following. There has been enough time for trials and errors, and we can reflect on what has worked:
Influencers
It is safe to say that Instagram influencers came to play an important role in defining brand desirability. Numbers don’t lie: celebrity influencer posts have increased engagement for luxury brands by 30% (HelloSociety). A high-end product on a person whose style/lifestyle you, perhaps, admire, can be enough to convince a consumer to splurge on luxury brands’ product.
Ohhcouture, an Instagram influencer with 1.4 million followers (October 2017), can be seen promoting luxury brands in nearly every post of her star ranked profile. Her latest gig at Tiffany&Co event was actively promoted in posts and Instagram Stories, combining the influencer’s creative vision with an obvious product placement.
Choosing an influencer is an art, which luxury brands have to consider carefully: Instagram star’s personality, reputation and creative vision has to match the brand’s values. Such successful collaboration provides the brand with an exposure towards the desirable pool of potential customers.
Relevance
Some luxury brands ensure that a significant amount of their content is coming from their customer’s posts on social media. The sourcing of content from Instagram users engaged with the brand provides an opportunity to maintain relevancy. Saks Fifth Avenue Instagram feed shows 70% internally generated content and 30% customer generated content.
Instagram Stories provide a platform for less “polished” photos and videos to be shared. The don’t require the same production value, and let the consumers take a look behind the glossy glamour of a luxury brand. It is a great way to communicate the brand’s “ethos” — a set values, personality, and passions. Casual communication might just be a key to appearing relatable that old luxury brands needed to attract younger, digitally savvy customers.
Insiders
Insights into the life of a brand nourish engagement. Instagram provided an opportunity to spread light on crafts and heritage of the old luxury houses.
Chanel is the leader in the amount of Instagram followers among the competition, standing at 24 million fans (Sept 2017). In the ongoing promotional campaign for perfume Gabrielle, they introduced a series of videos featuring the process of creation of a product: everything from initial inspiration to design of the flacon.
Valentino (9.2 million followers) thrives at offering its followers the ultimate “behind the scenes” experience: a mixture of products, glimpses of the people behind the brand and “as seen on celebrity”, model and magazine shots.
For an even more lively “inside look” experience, Tommy Hilfiger (5.3 million followers) created an “InstaPit” at its fashion shows — an area with seats for social media influencers to take snaps of the runway.
Conclusion
Compared to other fashion brands’ Instagram profiles, old luxury powerhouses have to act in moderation. The image they reflect has to be carefully crafted. Unfiltered, scattered content threatens the aura of exclusivity.
“Their task, rather, is to tailor the many possibilities of social media to flatter and frame their own unique value propositions and aspirational cues.”
— Shama Hyder is Founder & CEO of Marketing Zen
The trick is in thoughtfulness of every image, message, video or influencer reflecting the ethos of a brand. Every kind of engagement has to serve a purpose of a. remaining exclusive while communicating the brand’s values in a relatable manner; and b. being treated as an opportunity to open up to the customers, avoiding the image of a dry ad campaign.
The future possibilities are exciting for old luxury brands setting off to discover new means of communicating with a potential client. Hashtags and heritage: one should not harm the other!
