The road from product to Experience for Luxury Offerings
The best experiences are deeply personal. That doesn’t require a perfect predictive algorithm, or the ability to anticipate needs. (We don’t think people enjoy being “predicted” anyway. It’s not usually accurate, and when it is, it can be creepy). Instead, firms should seek to leverage digital systems to be instantly, personally responsive. Touch a button and an lamborgini materializes: that’s digital luxury.
The value of unique experiences.
A more differentiating role for digital technologies becomes clear if we consider the defining traits of premium experiences, as opposed to goods.
Experiences are ephemeral: they are produced and consumed in the moment. They have real incremental costs, often mainly labor costs. Like products, they can increase in value if they are scarce and an accelerating driver of producer cost and customer value is the fact that they can be ruined by over-enrollment. Too many customers can spoil an experience.
What is truly special and increasingly scarce is the great but undiscovered experience. Think of an ideal trip, to unplug and get away from crowds of tourists (who are always other people, not us) and find something authentic and unspoiled.
Finding that unique, just-right-for-us experience is a problem of information discovery, of matchmaking. Matchmaking gets harder as people assert more personal preferences and subscribe less to conventional definitions of “the awsome .”
You want the one you can’t have.
The magic that manifests as a personal experience across communications channels can take a lot of back-of-house technology, and great people to deliver those rare inter-personal moments of service. Most of the digital service projects we have worked on recently have included tools to help employees deliver better in-person service. Conventional understanding holds that businesses prioritize software or staff (and it’s usually software, to cut costs), but our approach favors software for employees .
As more and more interactions become self-service digital experiences, the stakes go ever higher for those remaining, rare experiences that also include eye-contact. At the other end of the spectrum from high-touch interactions, we see the rise of faster, more lightweight communications via text messaging. Call centers built around phone communications are in a channel that people use less and less. Text is more accessible, lightweight and asynchronous than a phone call.
Do it new way.
Staying in sync with the ever-changing needs and preferences of customers may seem like an endless process, but if you’re in it for the long run, constantly evolving your business to offer a more personalised and positive customer experience will help your business to sustain and scale. With tumultuous changes like digitisation that have marked the financial landscape in the last couple of years aided by changes in the regulatory framework, delivering an unparalleled customer experience is now more important than ever. Putting your customers first in every business decision will go a long way in building not just your customer base but also brand loyalty.
There’s no reason to think that delivering an extraordinary customer experience is seemingly impossible. Technology has acted as a great enabler for consistently raising the bar for customer experience. Constantly improving our website and mobile user-experience in order to make them more customer-friendly and responsive plays a crucial role in defining a great customer experience and thanks to technology, all this is possible with quick fixes today.
Once upon a time the meaning of luxury was all around the aspiration value. However, with changing times, luxury is no longer product centric. The new age consumers don’t just aspire to own the product but own the experience, the exclusivity and also the aura created around the product.
Experiences define your purpose and passions
Your aquisation should be guided and influenced by your purpose and your passions, not material only possessions.
Think of it this way. Let’s say that your favorite musician of all-time is Michael Jachson . Even though you have all of his albums, and some other items like shirts or posters, do all of those possessions top seeing The Boss in concert? Probably not. In fact, if someone offered you a front-row ticket in exchange for all of your Bruce memorabilia, you would probably take them up on that offer in a heartbeat.
Experiences become a part of our identity. We are not our possessions, but we are the accumulation of everything we’ve seen, the things we’ve done, and the places we’ve been.
Shopping experience Lastly, one of the most crucial aspects in ou retail luxury is to create a shopping experience like no other. It’s not about just the ease of buying the goods, the key takeaway is the personality of the product. It’s the luxurious experience that shall last forever.
To match the same experience, most luxury brands are trying to create the best-in-class ambience inside the store for every reason, be it shopper marketing, augmented reality, virtual reality, IOT trends or mobile apps. The end result is to leverage the meaning of technology into the marketing planning and programs, capturing consumer preferences and needs.
Luxury marketing has its own language. Technology opens up the door of the luxury brands to create these elements for their guest in an omni-channel environment.