Luxury Institute News

August 7, 2012

10 Things Apple Won’t Tell You

From customer service to app safety and even how its devices affect our relationships, here are 10 things Apple won’t likely tell you about its products and its business.

By Quentin Fottrell
SmartMoney
August 6, 2012

1.”Our customers are worn out.”

All that initial excitement over the first iPhone or iPad has quickly given way to what analysts are dubbing “upgrade fatigue” — with even Apple’s most loyal customers upset about the steady stream of newer models. In fact, when people buy Apple’s latest product, the company is usually already preparing its replacement, says technology consultant Patchen Barrs, who has owned 25 Apple products over the last 20 years. “Everything we buy from them is already out of date,” he says. Take a count: Since 2001, there have been six iPods, two iPod minis, six iPod Nanos, four iPod Shuffles and four editions of the iPod Touch. Apple has released five iPhone models since 2007 and has had three iPads since 2010.

Of course, newer models have their upsides: They’re usually slimmer, faster and have additional features like better cameras and improved screen quality. And Apple, which declined to comment for this story, has said that such improvements more than justify the fast pace of their new additions. (In March, for example, Apple spokeswoman Trudy Muller said the latest iPad delivered a “stunning” screen display.) But that argument isn’t enough to appease some cash-strapped consumers. Almost 50% of consumers say they’re increasingly unwilling to buy new products for fear that they will be rendered outdated by even newer versions, according to a recent survey of 2,000 people by Marketing Magazine in the U.K.

Click the link to read the entire article which includes a quote from Milton Pedraza, CEO of Luxury Institute: http://www.marketwatch.com/Story/Story/?guid={61E63842-DFED-11E1-961B-002128049AD6}

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April 24, 2012

Wealthy U.S. Consumers Favor and Feel More Connected to Luxury Brands Offering a Mobile App

Posted in Customer Experience,Luxury Brands,Mobile,Mobile Commerce,Press Releases,Wealthy Consumer
Tags: Gilt Groupe, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Milton Pedraza, mobile applications, Mobile Commerce, Plastic Mobile, Saks, Wealthy Consumers —

(NEW YORK) April 24, 2012 – The independent and objective New York City-based Luxury Institute, in cooperation with award-winning mobile marketing agency Plastic Mobile, surveyed affluent U.S. consumers about the growing connection between luxury and the emerging mobile market. The results of their research have just been released in the study, “Mobile Apps And Commerce for Luxury Brands.”

“Luxury brands must acknowledge the impact of technology advancements in the mobile space and find a humanistic way to connect and engage with their consumers through mobile,” says Milton Pedraza, CEO of Luxury Institute.

Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Gilt Groupe are the most frequently downloaded apps by wealthy consumers who have luxury brand applications on their mobile device. Most affluent smartphone owners who are downloading luxury apps are using them to find information on products, services or brands (56%).

Almost all wealthy consumers who have used luxury brand apps report that they have had a good experience with the mobile apps (93%). In addition, 71% report that they feel better connected to luxury brands after downloading and/or using their applications and 64% view luxury brands that offer a mobile application more favorably than brands that do not.

The survey respondents indicate there are a number of features they expect from luxury brand applications and highlight loyalty programs (46%) and early access to sales (45%) as the most important. In addition, providing sales professionals with a mobile application that can specify details about products (53%), have the ability to check for sizes and availability at other stores (50%) and in-store product inventory (47%) would enrich the luxury shopping experience for affluent consumers.

Of the 63% of wealthy consumers who have made a purchase through their mobile device, just under 20% have bought a luxury product or service. While preference for the in-store experience (45%) is why wealthy smartphone users have not yet fully embraced luxury mobile commerce, the majority of luxury consumers who choose to shop via mobile report that there is no upper monetary limit to how much they would spend (72%). This indicates a tremendous emerging opportunity for luxury brands to connect with consumers through mobile.

“Mobile has been receiving a lot attention in the retail space lately. The study suggests the mobile strategy for luxury brands must be about enhancing the in-store customer experience and using the platform to help strengthen customer relationships,” says Melody Adhami, President and COO of Plastic Mobile.

About Luxury Institute (www.LuxuryInstitute.com)
The Luxury Institute is the objective and independent global voice of the high net-worth consumer. The Institute conducts extensive and actionable research with wealthy consumers about their behaviors and attitudes on customer experience best practices. In addition, we work closely with top-tier luxury brands to successfully transform their organizational cultures into more profitable customer-centric enterprises. Our Luxury CRM Culture consulting process leverages our fact-based research and enables luxury brands to dramatically Outbehave as well as Outperform their competition. The Luxury Institute also operates LuxuryBoard.com, a membership-based online research portal, and the Luxury CRM Association, a membership organization dedicated to building customer-centric luxury enterprises.

About Plastic Mobile
Plastic Mobile is an award-winning mobile marketing agency of thinkers, artists, creators and builders with one common aspiration: to create extraordinary user experiences. Plastic Mobile is at the heart of the evolution of interactive mobile technology, pushing the boundaries and setting the bar for the standard of quality.

Known for many quality, first-in-kind mobile initiatives, Plastic Mobile delivers exceptional client service and highly customized mobile solutions for all platforms. With a diverse, high-profile client list, including Air Miles, Axe and Royal Le Page, they are the proud recipients of myriad awards, including the 15th annual Webby shopping award, “the Oscars of the Internet.” www.plasticmobile.com

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January 25, 2012

How next-generation commerce platforms can work for luxury retailers

Posted in E-Commerce,Mobile,Retail
Tags: Mobile Commerce, Multichannel commerce, Online shopping —

By Naveen Gunti and Chirag Patel
Luxury Daily
January 24, 2012

Luxury consumers are among a new breed of online shoppers who feel empowered by the Internet and research online to check the latest trends, find good deals and evaluate product quality.

Since luxury shoppers often pay premium prices, they feel entitled to a superior online shopping experience consisting of exciting product selection, rich visual content and excellent customer service.

Retailers understand the needs of their customers and are determined to create an online experience to cater to these shoppers.

In a recent Luxury CRM Association survey, 90 percent of executives agreed that luxury culture and values are directly linked to positive financial results. However, luxury firms tend to have smaller budgets and enter the ecommerce channel in progressive phases.

Bring your store online
As early-stage firms gained greater online visibility and brand awareness, they opened up light ecommerce capabilities based on a simple personal shopper model.

The personal-shopper experience allowed customers to email call customer service agents for placing orders on products that they were interested in from browsing the catalogs on the Web site. The customer service representative would appropriately respond through a follow up to complete and fulfill the order.

The success of this model eventually led these companies to start exploring additional online experiences to increase the throughput of the orders and support for enhanced merchandizing options for the products they want to sell online.

Retailers wanted to better enable the merchandising of their products, setup promotions and make them easier to find for the customers by allowing them to navigate in a meaningful and intuitive way.

As the businesses further scaled up and wanted to expand their reach, they sought multiple payment methods, strong order management, faster fulfillment, quicker checkout flow and increased customer engagement including post acquisition and conversions.

This demand saw a number of retailers focusing on specific building blocks of the commerce supply chain and this phase saw a huge growth in large retailers starting to bring their stores online.

Learn about customers and adapt
When the firms noticed an increase in sales revenue as a result of their online presence, they started to learn more about customers and adapt to their needs by increasing their budgets to cater to these changes and enhance their ecommerce capabilities.

Retailers desired standard shopping cart and order entry features as well as better templates to communicate their brand effectively. These firms also invested more in online order processing and warehouse fulfillment operations during this phase.

Firms like these started to increase their presence in the market place and desired to more effectively compete with other firms in the same market space.

Also, firms choose partners that help further increase sales and drive down operational costs.

For example, a firm may choose to integrate its commerce platform with an order management vendor to help them achieve efficiencies in settling payments, providing customer service, and providing additional reporting for current and historical sales trends.

However, the issue with firms at this stage is that they have platforms that are costly to integrate. It will be large investment for such a custom integration, so a firm must plan ahead and allocate the proper budget.

Firms at this stage also wanted to expand into other international markets.

Commerce platforms at this juncture allowed for internationalization, but this was usually handled with a complex workaround such as creating a separate instance for each international market in which that firm desires to do business.

The disadvantage of this approach is additional operational overhead in managing merchandising and marketing of each international market through separate platform instances.

As the sales scaled up, they were forced to shift strategies in order to compete more effectively with others in the market place. These firms wanted to engage online customers in newer and different ways.

Driving commerce without constraints
With the customer reach expanding to various channels, luxury retailers started to explore different avenues in improving customer experience, retention, throughput and fulfillment.

With the increase in demand began additional sales revenue growth as well as greater budgets for their other online channels.

These successful firms desire to be industry leaders in adopting additional Web 2.0 capabilities such as user communities, blogs and social commerce.

These brands added in additional long-term strategies by opening up to international markets as well as additional cross channels such as mobile and Facebook commerce.

What is next?
Retailers are demanding more capabilities to manage their electronic commerce and related cross-channel business lines including mobile commerce and Facebook Commerce.

There are rare cases where your electronic business strategy is perfectly aligned with your technology capabilities. In these cases, your technology systems can quickly adapt to the needs of your growing electronic sales channels.

As retailers evolve and grow multichannel businesses, platforms must be able to adopt sophisticated technology to match the strategy. In other words, they need a commerce platform that is more flexible, agile and mature.

Firms that are rolling out multi-region/multi-language/multi-currency/multichannel commerce sales capabilities are opening up numerous revenue opportunities. However, this also increases the complexities of managing all of these various sales channels.

To remain profitable, you will want to make investments that keep the operating costs low for managing merchandising, brand content, orders throughput and fulfillment logistics.

AT THIS EXCITING time, clients are expanding into more channels and more markets internationally. They are localizing pricing and content by region so that it becomes easy for the retailers to create region specific sites for their international customers.

Luxury Institute research on the wealthy consumer use of mobile devices shows that 76 percent compare prices via mobile devices, while a rapidly growing 27 percent have bought via a mobile device.

In addition, 21 percent report that they use mobile devices to look up respective product information while shopping in stores.

http://www.luxurydaily.com/how-next-generation-commerce-platforms-can-work-for-luxury-retailers/

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November 3, 2011

David Yurman goes mcommerce after Web traffic jumps 200pc

Posted in E-Commerce,Jewelry,Mobile,Mobile Commerce,Retail
Tags: Createthe Group, David Yurman, Mobile Commerce —

By Kayla Hutzler
Luxury Daily
November 2, 2011

Jewelry designer David Yurman decided it was time to create a mobile commerce-enabled site after the New York-based Luxury Institute revealed that more than 20 percent of consumers with at least $5 million in net-worth were shopping through mobile devices.

The new site, powered by the Createthe Group CTS platform, allows consumers to browse, search and buy products as well as find nearby stores. David Yurman is confident that the mobile commerce site will deepen engagement with consumers since the brand has already seen a 200 percent increase in Web site traffic from its previous mobile efforts.

“By providing the mobile site, David Yurman can offer an ideal enhanced and optimized shopping experience for consumers by letting them shop from wherever they please,” said Allen Kung, cofounder and chief technology officer of Createthe Group, New York.

“Affluent consumers are increasingly using the mobile channel to find products and discover product information and good deals, as well as purchase products,” he said. “Therefore, luxury and premium brands are investing more heavily in mobile commerce experiences to keep them engaged.”

Register rings

While David Yurman did have a mobile-optimized site for the past five years, which was also powered by the Createthe Group platform, this marks the first time that consumers will be able to purchase products through their mobile phones.

Indeed, the brand saw the need to create a mobile site based on third-party research from the Luxury Institute and PayPal, along with its personal experience – overall Web site traffic jumped after implementing mobile channels.

The new site is easily navigated and can be found at http://m.davidyurman.com.

The homepage features a vertical bar with tabs for shop, style, stores and search.

Tapping on the style tab bring consumers two options – “celebrity and events” or “shop the campaign.”

Within these sections, consumers can shop the products they discover by tapping on a “view products” box in the image.

Back on the homepage, there is also an campaign picture, followed by a vertical navigation bar that lists seven options: women, men, timepieces, gifts, collections, eyewear and fragrance.

Within each of the vertical bar tabs are a number of subcategories such as new arrivals, best sellers, rings and bracelets.

Check it out
When a consumer is done browsing and has added her desired products to the shopping bag, the checkout process is smooth and hassle-free.

Consumers have a few options after they wish to check-out. They can sign-in to their accounts, register for an account or simply check-out.

Not requiring consumers to create a username is a smart move since many consumers are likely in a rush when they are shopping on their mobile phones.

The mobile site also features a location-based store locator for consumers who prefer to buy products in-store.

David Yurman wanted to launch the new mobile site just in time for the holiday season since many of its best consumers are busy executives with little time to shop, according to Carol Pennelli, the brand’s president.

The shift to a mobile commerce experience was relatively easy since the jeweler was already using the CTS platform, according to Createthe Group’s Mr. Kung.

“The David Yurman mobile commerce experience is not just another cookie-cutter mobile site experience,” Mr. Kung said. “The beauty and elegance of the David Yurman brand was not lost in the execution and creative interface design.

“[Consumers] will [now] enjoy the greater speed, ease and convenience of shopping on-the-go from anywhere they please at any time of the day,” he said. “It will make holiday shopping faster and easier for time-pressed shoppers as well as discriminating affluent consumers searching for the most unique and perfect gifts.”

http://www.luxurydaily.com/david-yurman-does-its-homework-launches-mcommerce-site/

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August 11, 2010

How Affluents Use Mobile for Shopping and Buying

Posted in Mobile Commerce,Retail
Tags: Mobile Commerce, smartphone —

AUGUST 11, 2010
eMarketer.com

Do the habits of the ultrawealthy point to the future of m-commerce?

The best mobile commerce user experience comes from downloading shopping apps on a smartphone. Though growth in smartphone sales is increasing and the devices are spreading through the population, smartphone owners still tend to be more affluent than average.

And affluents may be taking the lead in shopping and buying via mobile. According to a spring 2010 survey by PriceGrabber.com, 13% of all US web-enabled mobile users reported purchasing online. That was up from 10% in 2009. InsightExpress found predictably lower usage among all mobile users, at 5% in Q2 2010.

Based on a report from The Luxury Institute, affluent and ultra-affluent mobile users are more likely to make purchases from their mobile devices. One in five respondents with incomes of at least $150,000 said they did so at least rarely, and among users with net worth of at least $5 million m-commerce was even more popular.

Movie and event tickets, along with technology and personal electronics, were the most popular items purchased via mobile by affluents, similar to the general population. But ultra-affluents were more likely to also use their phones to buy high-ticket items like designer bags and shoes, jewelry and automotive products.

Affluents also differed from the general population when asked about the barriers to further mobile commerce usage. Most were not worried about security problems or mobile web hassles, but simply felt no need to shop via mobile.

The types of activities the wealthy used their mobile phones for while shopping were similar to those of the general population. As in the InsightExpress survey of all mobile users, respondents to The Luxury Institute poll were most likely to have used their phone to call and talk to someone about an item. Sending a text or picture message was also popular in both surveys.

Looking up product information was also common, with a view to comparing prices, getting product descriptions, looking for deals and checking store information. These are typical mobile shopping behaviors of all mobile users. Ultra-affluents were less interested in some activities, like price comparison.

While wealthy shoppers have a few unusual habits, like purchasing luxury products on the go, many are simply using the same mobile tools as the general population with greater frequency and fewer concerns.

http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007859

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