Culture Chanel Website Fails To Maximize Viewer Interaction Opportunity

DesignTracker Luxury Daily critiques French fashion brand Chanel’s new micro website supporting Culture Chanel, a new exhibition in Shanghai’s Museum of Contemporary Art.

The website is getting enormous traffic, based on their Alexa.com rank of 10,000 already. When Christopher Dessi, managing partner at Drive Action Digital, comments “This looks great, but Chanel does not drive users to social destinations,” he is spot on, calling the online exhibit a linear event, and not inclusive and social.

As Luxury Daily and Dessi acknowledge, many luxury brands believe that social media dilute brand prestige, although LVMH and Burberry disagree. Both companies are deeply committed to direct interaction with their customers, agreeing to lose some control of the editorial process.

NOWNESS.com allows viewer to vote Love | Don’t Love on each day’s featured post. Not only does NOWNESS generally produce great content but that single gesture elicits physical, mental and evaluation engagement from the viewer.

Consumer research will tell you this is a major step in inspiring me to return again. Cognitive anthropologist Dr. Bob Deutsch argues that luxury brands must move beyond social networks to a more sophisticated level of engagement with consumers.

To build a brand, luxury marketers should not waste time asking what consumers like, need or want; they should discover who these people really are.  This requires research techniques that can elicit – and hear — stories about how people feel about their world and the world.  The subtext of stories is people’s identities, not their interests.

This modification in perspective will help luxury marketers have a hand in sculpting the changes that are shifting the ground under their feet.  These changes include:

• From brands to “me-as-brand.”
• From person-as-viewer to person-as-participant to person-as-creator-of-content.
• From product-to-person communication to person-to-person conversation.
• From information-gathering to experience-gathering.

Social Tribes Are More Potent Than Social Networks for Luxury Brands is a must read article for business and brand folks. So is Fashion’s Collective. Anne

More reading:

Brands Create Online Media Outlets to Bypass Magazine Costs & Restrictions