Columns

In an ecommerce and mobile world where data is easily compromised, retailers and brands need to make digital safety a priority and uphold a higher standard for financial security and privacy for consumers.

“South Coast Plaza” is a retrospective book that celebrates the Southern California-based shopping center’s 50 years and traces the heritage and transformation of this landmark into a commercial and cultural icon featuring 250 stores, 30 restaurants and storied luxury brands such as Louis Vuitton, Hermès, Chanel, Cartier, Gucci, Prada, Tiffany, Harry Winston, Rolex, A. Lange & Söhne, Mikimoto, Patek Philippe, Van Cleef & Arpels and Vacheron Constantin. Here is an exclusive excerpt.

Mobile, connected and global: business people, travelers and tourists are forming an ever-increasing market of nomadic consumers. This book excerpt explores the unprecedented path to luxury and the questions of where to catch the luxury nomads, what to offer them and how to seduce them into buying.

Media baron Rupert Murdoch, summing up his business philosophy, recently said, “The world is changing very fast. Big will not beat small anymore. It will be the fast beating the slow.”

Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs are radically redefining marketers’ relationships with customers.

Thought-leadership in luxury focused on key issues dominating the business: reinvention or adaptation to evolving consumer behavior, cultivating emerging generations with buying power who supposedly value experience over products, digital disruption with ecommerce and mobile, the eternal struggle with scale versus exclusivity, role of the bricks-and-mortar store, and the very definition of luxury. Here are the 10 columns in Luxury Daily that asked – or answered – the most thought-provoking questions of the day.

In our global market, we see that money has a migration pattern. When you put pressure, be it economic, environmental or political in one area, another area responds.

Millennials may be the first generation to possess no assets.

As marketing increasingly must take real-time local inventory into account and activate to personalize in real time, siloes deliver only a fraction of your potential success.

Retailers often lose sight of their customers’ offline behavior once they exit their doors. This is important, because if they maintained that line of sight, they would be in a position to understand who they are truly competing against.

What effect will the rollout next year of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) have on a business that relies on strictly targeted marketing?

Has Facebook really adapted in a way that makes the environment more hospitable to the luxury set?

With the rise of instant messaging services such as WhatsApp, iMessage and Facebook Messenger, many industry experts have questioned the longevity of SMS.

Around the world, a slew of iconic luxury and household brand names have stepped forward to transform and reinvent their marketing leadership. This significant shift in strategy portends a new approach to luxury marketing in 2018 — an approach that prioritizes long-term growth and brand vision over short-term sales.

In a prior column, we discussed Forever 21’s lawsuit against Gucci, seeking to cancel Gucci’s registrations for its Blue-Red-Blue and Green-Red-Green striped marks, and for a declaration that its clothing and accessory products that incorporate similar striping are not infringing.

This year continues to see great change to retailers regardless of where they are or what they are selling.

The vertiginous heights of the art market are not that surprising anymore. They testify to the growing independence of the high end of the market from the other parts, and from the dictums and constraints of professional expertise.

Following this year’s string of breaches and malware attacks, methods such as passwords, pins and fixed physical characteristics such as fingerprints are not enough to secure consumer information.

The sad reality is that we have allowed and even been conditioned as consumers to believe that good is good enough. This encroachment on our lives is a dangerous path that could eventually eliminate the need for, and respect of, artisans. The truth, good is not great.

According to Bain & Co., worldwide luxury sales online and in-store declined in 2016, due in large part to widespread physical store closures. However, online sales are on a positive trajectory, showing a double-digit increase from 2015 to 2016.

What if you planned your meeting from the customer’s point of view?