Visibility

Although luxury brands aren't targeted at your average Joe, they are still keen to harnass social media. Louis Vuitton and Moët Hennessy's (LVMH) EVP, Kamel Ouadi, discusses what approach the elite are taking.

Kamel Ouadi, digital EVP for new online magazine Nowness will be speaking on ‘The social web: New ways of creating, sharing and consuming information in the digital age at ad:tech London 21-22 September. Find out more and book your tickets.
 
Despite the recession cloud still hanging over global commerce, luxury brands are, surprisingly, still trading as if the collapse of Northern Rock was just a bad dream and Lehman Brothers a blip. So why has LVMH launched a luxury lifestyle website that doesn't sell anything?

Launched in the February of this year, the groups's online offering, called 'Nowness', has already attracted 300,000 newsletter signups. "Our site is about inspiring people," says Kamel Ouadi, digital EVP for new online magazine Nowness. "It's not about revenue."

But it is about: art, cinema, entertainment, culture, music, gastronomy, design, travel and, course, fashion. Plus anything else you could imagine a 25-40 year-old, high-flying, urban professional wanting the best of. And seeing as the LVMH group comprises of brands like Dom Pérignon, Givenchy, Christian Dior and De Beers (to mention only a handful), it's unsurprising that Nowness is a sophisticated little beauty. It's sleek, sophisticated and minimalist, without a pop up or banner ad in sight. It is picture led, with striking (and trendy) photography in neat boxes and grids. The whole website screams 'aspiration'.

Each day it boasts a shiny new feature. Today, it's mouthwatering closeups of cuisine from a hip New York restaurant. The content is exclusive (no regurgitating press releases for these chaps) and I'm told it's not limited to LVMH brands. Nowness will feature any luxury brand as long as "they fit the space".

"Luxury brands need a chic and elegant space to promote their stories," explains Ouadi. "We believe that luxury brands are full of creativity and we built this space for them to explore their creativity in a nice environment. Because the space didn't exist before."

As many of the biggest luxury brands in the world belong to the exclusive LVMH group, it scarcely needs to scrabble around in the dirt to find funding. The group recorded a revenue of €17.1 billion in 2009. Louis Vuitton alone recorded double-digit revenue growth for the year. But with absolutely no advertising, how is it making money? Nowness project manager Jessica Martino explains that they partner with brands. And Ouadi says that the editorial team will "find ways for them to have a presence on our site that reinforces the experience we offer". But that the main objective is to get a good foundation of readers first.

"Good content is our objective right now," he says. "Good content gets readers involved and develops a community. This is key to building a following," says Ouadi. Bearing in mind it launched in February 2010 with minimal marketing, it has built quite a following. Apart from the newsletter subscribers, Nowness already has more than 9,200 followers on Twitter.

The first piece of functionality that jumps out the screen is the 'Love/Don't Love' button that allows users rate the article either way and therefore interact with what kind of content they'd like to read more or less of. I note that it also has the added advantage of telling the editorial and marketing teams how users are responding to the content.

Ouadi sums up the function up in one sentence: "It's about the personalisation of luxury inspiration," he says. The love/don't love button is not a unique idea, sites like digg and Facebook have been touting versions of it for a while now. But the crux here is how well it allows users to become part of the conversation. "It's a nice way to explore the site's content," says Ouadi. "We're in the process of building new interfaces on a monthly basis," says Ouadi. "They'll surprise and delight," he promises.

The most recent addition is the site is the 'Nowness explorer', a map that allows the user to browse content by location, category and popularity. Colour-coded circles display the content type, and each circle's size is proportionate to its popularity – the larger the circle, the more loved the stories. The website proclaims: "Search for restaurants in Milan, fashion in London or travel ideas in Moscow: just click on a circle to access all the content at that location." Very swish.

The New York Times recently ran an article arguing that the whole model of selling to young, urban professionals has been completely rewritten for the 21st century. It calls these new yuppies the 'millennials' and says that millennials want to be "entertained and informed", ie. just shouting your message is not enough.

"Engagement is about conversation and letting the reader take part in the experience," Ouadi insists. "Nowness is a new model. It's not a commerce site like Net-a-Porter [or ASOS]. And it's editorially independent. Before there was no real space online that understood the meaning of luxury. There's a lot of information everywhere, a lot of news." But nowhere millennials really trust – apart from their peers.

"We are working with social media influencers to get our message out there," says Ouadi. "What we're doing is an act of community and innovation. We're not selling, we're taking part in a conversation."

More and more, luxury brands are engaging with millennials instead of "talking at them". Advertising up until now has been telling people what they need and want. Now we’re seeing even aspirational brands willing to engage with the social media – albeit in their own sophisticated style. "We need to adapt our marketing to a new digital generation,” Ouadi tells me. It's what customers expect, whether they're spending a few pence or hundreds of pounds. Integrating content and commerce is essentially building a trusting relationship between consumer and company. It has proven to be a powerful way to drive sales in the past. And it now it seems to be the future.

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