THE Luxury Dilemma, solved

We have the pleasure of working with a wide range of client companies. Some are resolutely mainstream, requiring fascinating segmentation models to address their broad customer bases. Others are decidedly niche - often luxury brands serving the needs and desires of smaller groups of high net worth individuals.

The more we work with the latter, the more it strikes us that such brands frequently share a problem. Having been honed over decades (often centuries) and generations of family members, with history, heritage, patrimony and iconic products now revered in museums around the globe, the problem they now face is how does one represent a luxury brand to the sufficient calibre, in the ever-changing world of digital media?

So, what is calibre? In our eyes, it is the standard to which a company judges its own products and services to be worthy of presentation to its customers. Below that standard everything should be rejected, or returned to the “factory” for improvement. But how many companies apply such standards to ALL of their customer communications? Surely they all should.

However, integrating your website, email marketing activity and social media with traditional advertising and the face-to-face customer experience - retail, event, home - can seem daunting. Rest assured, THE has worked many times with long-standing brand ambassadors, often senior members of the family, and we can vouch for the sense of satisfaction that can be achieved by helping them realise their aspirations for the brand they love, through digital media.

Many such companies don’t have - and don’t want - huge in-house teams (or agencies) working extensively on their marketing and advertising. Therefore, they often find that while some of their communications are crafted beautifully, others - usually digital - fall well short of the calibre one would expect.

Ensuring all communications are up to calibre DOES NOT necessitate vast expense. We solve this in eCRM by implementing a tiered modularisation solution. Tiered because only some objectives justify the full range of design and technical skills required to produce unique, innovative, response-maximising, bespoke communications. Others can meet the calibre more simply.

In the bricks and mortar world you can do your brand severe damage through bad customer treatment, untidy retail space, poor packaging, etc. The digital equivalent are things like uninspiring design, incorrect personalisation, stretched logos, broken links and communications, for example emails, that don’t display properly on mobile and therefore deliver a poor customer experience.

With our tiered approach there are essentially two ways to ensure calibre.

The top tier is most appropriate where one expects each incremental improvement to a communication to realise a tangible benefit, especially return on investment. With our full-service solution we manage everything from campaign strategy, through creative design and modular build, all the way to results analysis and next step recommendation. When working on an email marketing campaign, we underpin this service with our reusable, modularisation process. This enables us to be confident that we're providing excellent value for money through delivering highly-compelling, flexible solutions that achieve the required results quickly and efficiently. For example, when we're tasked to achieve incremental sales, maximise event attendance and deliver on other measurable goals, it’s the “surprise and delight” elements that we craft into bespoke communications that maximise audience attention, interest, desire and action.

The second tier is also founded on our modularisation process, but is focused on communications where a high degree of deliverability is still required, but maximum audience reaction is not essential. For example, notifying customers of a delivery date or retailers of a product change, and inviting journalists to an event that is expected to be oversubscribed, etc. For such communications we provide a simpler template that enables our clients to manage their own eCRM communications without the need for additional creative design or HTML coding skills. Such communications will still meet the calibre because we have pre-determined all elements of brand representation.

The results? Once the calibre is established for a brand, we ensure that all future communications meet that calibre. Even for the most fastidious luxury brand. Speed and efficiently can be brought to the fore where necessary but, when you really need to delight the most demanding customers, we add the crucial ingredients of creativity and innovation.

If you can see our flexible (and fast) modular approach being of use to your marketing communications, whether you consider your brand to be luxury or mainstream, we’d love to talk.

Shall we put the kettle on?