The September 15 launch of London Fashion Week — in which many brands are revealing a more avant-garde design focus — coincided with the re-launched creative identity, website and marketing of luxury brand Burberry. Looking at both, it’s clear that change is afoot in luxury. As luxury brands rethink old playbooks, many are also embracing new models for loyalty programs and strategies for customer acquisition.
During a September 15 panel discussion during the LFW-adjacent Digital Fashion Week in London, organized in partnership with Epic Games, web3 experts with luxury brand clients spoke about the innovative acquisition and retention tactics brands are buying into now. Key takeaways are below.
Why luxury is engaging with web3
“Web3 is a digital-first ecosystem, but we’re using the digital to pull [people] into IRL events. And the main point of traditional luxury loyalty programs was that, as well. That is why brands are considering web3. They’re trying to engage consumers around the world, particularly from Asia and the Americas, and they’re using the digital world to convince them to come and engage IRL [in their stores]. They do that because luxury brands, to this day, make the majority of their revenue through in-store sales.” –Aleksija Vujicic, investor at blockchain investment company Celestia Capital
Engaging customers with co-creation and AI
“Co-creation has traditionally been very difficult because the barriers to entry for creation are very high. Either you don’t have the skills to be able to design or you don’t have great graphics to understand the brand identity. But with the new AI models coming out, brands are training these models on the entities of the brand — the colors and fonts, the general vibe — and that can allow consumers to better interact with the brand and co-create products. Just by entering very simple prompts, they can create a product that’s true to that brand’s identity.” –Vujicic
“Through co-creation, brands are listening to their fan base and their customers, and sharing prototypes, and getting ideas from the ground roots. It’s a new form of research, which is hopefully immediately being integrated into the next level, which are the collections and the next items that will be produced.” –Stefan Kovach, strategic advisor at web3 advisory company Rarer Things
Rethinking the multi-brand loyalty program
“Typically, when brands participate in [multi-brand loyalty] programs, they feel that they’re losing hard-earned loyalty program customers to other brands and that they’re the ones bringing the value to that coalition program. They start to wonder why they’re participating. The value is in shifting the framework around these programs from multi-brand loyalty programs to multi-branded user acquisition programs. Through customer challenges, [for example,] consumers could earn tokens. … and then they could spend those tokens across a multitude of brands.” –Vujicic
