Beauty and hotel brands including L’Occitane, Four Seasons, InterContinental, Estee Lauder and Lancome excelled in their digital marketing strategies in emerging markets, according to L2 Think Tank’s inaugural Digital IQ for Brazil, Russia and India. Fashion and watch/jewelry brands fell to the much more overall-competent beauty and hotel brands. The brands that succeeded did so through market localization, adoption to social media channels and ironing out currency details on Web sites. “BRI markets are expected to make up 20 percent of the luxury market by 2025 and will become an increasingly important part of the mix for a number of brands,” said Maureen Mullen, director of research and advisory at L2 Think Tank, New York. “As far as it relates to where brands are in the state of investment, most luxury brands are really in the early stages. “I think that for digital as a whole and how it pertains to the BRI markets, you have to maintain a strong global brand image, but tailor and custom to local preference, languages and platforms,” she said. L2 Think Tank’s BRI Digital IQ ranked 100 luxury brands across Web site effectiveness, digital marketing, social media and mobile. Local lure The top brand in Brazil was L’Occitane. The beauty marketer was the only one with full Facebook-commerce capability. In addition, its hand cream giveaway prompted 40,000 fans in 12 days on its Brazilian page. Another key brand in Brazil was InterContinental. The hotel’s Sao Paulo property maintained a laudable presence on Facebook, Twitter, Orkut and foursquare. A few retailers did well in Brazil. Ranked 7 and 8, respectively, Net-A-Porter’s Brazilian site has transparent local pricing that discloses duties and taxes while Burberry is one of the few brands to send Portuguese-language emails and has 11,000 followers on @burberry_brazil. The next market surveyed was Russia. Again, L’Occitane took the lead with its Russia-dedicated Facebook page and Twitter accounts in addition to presence on VK, Odnoklassniki and LiveJournal. L’Occitane also has commerce-enabled Android and iPhone apps and an optimized site. Hotel brands including Ritz-Carlton and InterContinental were also given high digital IQs because of their localized Web sites. Cartier also made it into the top 20 with its Russia-optimized mobile site for brides. L’Occitane was not the most-advanced luxury brand in India, but it did make it into the top 10 for its Facebook prowess. Instead, the highest-ranked luxury brand was Burberry at No. 3 for its “Art of the Trench” campaign with an Indian flair that enlisted images from street photographer Manou. The brand also feted its seventh Indian store. However, hotel brands took over the board for luxury brands in India. ITC, InterContinental, Taj, Le Meridien, Four Seasons and JW Marriott were all lauded for their digital prowess in areas spanning social media to site optimization. Falling fashion It is interesting to note that luxury apparel and accessory brands did not fare as well as hotel and beauty brands. This could be because the price point for beauty brands is usually more accessible than high-end apparel brands, and a number of hotels have been forced to localize themselves quickly from a customer service perspective, according to Ms. Mullen. “Even if these brands are headquartered out of Western markets, they have people on the ground from the brand in their local markets that are using Facebook and Twitter which has really raised the overall digital IQ in those markets,” Ms. Mullen said. However, there were some strokes of genius from retailers and apparel brands, namely on social media sites. For example, Dolce & Gabbana promotes its VK – a Russian social media site – across their site and global Facebook page. It has the largest VK community of any prestige brand. In fact, 5 percent of traffic to http://www.dolcegabbana.com is from Russia, per L2. Meanwhile, Cartier’s L’Odyssee de Cartier was globally launched across India, China and Russia. The campaign generated more than 250,000 new Facebook fans and 14.8 views on YouTube. Cartier does not have country-specific Facebook pages, but its sites are available in both Russian and Portuguese, per L2 Think Tank. That being said, most luxury brands do need to work a little harder to gain presence in BRI markets, especially since they are expected to become some of the main sources of revenue for the luxury industry in the coming years, according to Ms. Mullen. “I think that the first step is basic language localization,” Ms. Mullen said. “What we saw across the board is that brands that actually have local language sites have a huge opportunity to speak to consumers. “Brands are also behind in search engine optimization and paid search,” she said. “This makes even brands that have a local site hard to find. “It is so important to develop a presence in these markets that will largely be the future determinants of success in this industry.” Final Take Rachel Lamb, associate reporter on Luxury Daily, New York