Online luxury: The code breakers of a traditional sector

Abstract

In the recent years, the Internet has been a key factor in the evolution of globalization. Allowing a development at a speed, which have never been seen before, it completely revolutionized the way we exchange, communicate, trade and buy. Luxury, which has been a traditional market for thousands of years without ever seeing many changes, couldn’t be spared from such a life-changing discovery. Here is the concern, how to match those two words which, at a glance, have nothing to do in common? Not only how to adapt the Internet to the luxury world, but also how to adapt luxury to the Internet? More than this, until which level can they both be adapted without being denaturalized?From a branding point of view, the challenge is already determinant and we will try to answer these questions in our research. On the other side, we get the customers. Indeed, from a traditional segmentation, the Internet opened the way for a new type of customers to play a huge role in the luxury industry. We can therefore wonder who those customers are. What are they waiting for in terms of service? How do you match the customer expectations while staying coherent with your brand?More than a debate about luxury and the Internet, we can extrapolate this subject as a way of dealing with tradition and modernism, and how initial challenges can create opportunities to reach new territories and create amazing brand experiences.