Luxury goes digital: how to tackle the digital luxury brand–consumer touchpoints

Abstract

Today, many of the big brands are diverting substantial amounts of resources away from classical communication channels toward the digital domain. However, despite the digital gold rush, major sections of luxury brands still have not fully arrived in the digital world. Their sentiment increasingly shifts from “Do we need to be online?” to a more complicated question: “How do we actually do it right?” Therefore, this paper has two major objectives. First of all, we want to provide luxury marketers with an overview of the major digital luxury brand–consumer touchpoints and corresponding digital working areas. The first step to digital excellence is to know the available digital opportunities. Based on that, we want to derive some recommendations regarding how to tackle the digital channels successfully, based on an expert survey and a discussion of case studies for each major digital touchpoint. The paper concludes with some major lessons learned.