Michel Chevalier - Luxury Retail and Digital Management: Developing Customer Experience in a Digital World

1. Chapter 1
2. Chapter 2
3. Chapter 3
4. Chapter 6
5. Chapter 7
6. Chapter 8
7. Chapter 9
8. Chapter 12
9. Chapter 13
10. Chapter 14
11. Chapter 15
12. Chapter 16

1. Chapter 3
2. Chapter 4
3. Chapter 5
4. Chapter 7
5. Chapter 11
6. Chapter 12
7. Chapter 14
8. Chapter 15
9. Chapter 16

SECOND EDITION

Michel Chevalier

Michel Gutsatz

Copyright 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Singapore Pte. Ltd.

Published by John Wiley & Sons Singapore Pte. Ltd.

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All rights reserved.

Edition History

John Wiley & Sons Singapore Pte. Ltd. (1e, 2012)

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Chevalier, Michel, author. | Gutsatz, Michel, author.

Title: Luxury retail and digital management : developing customer experience in a digital world / Michel Chevalier, Michel Gutsatz.

Other titles: Luxury retail management

Description: Second edition. | Solaris South Tower, Singapore : Wiley, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019048771 (print) | LCCN 2019048772 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119542339 (hardback) | ISBN 9781119542346 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119542353 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Luxury goods industryManagement. | Retail tradeManagement.

Classification: LCC HD9999.L852C34 2020 (print) | LCC HD9999.L852 (ebook) | DDC 658.8/7dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019048771

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019048772

Cover Design: Wiley

Cover Image: jcarroll-images/Getty Images

You can have the best strategy in the world, the difference between the excellent and the incompetent is execution, execution, execution.

Domenico deSole, former CEO Gucci

I am convinced Michel Gusatz and Michel Chevalier are very right in writing a second edition of their comprehensive book on the retail management of luxury goods.

I see three major forces converge and reshape this area:

First, as the title of the new book suggests, digital has taken the luxury goods industry by storm including its retail side. Ten years ago, you could find the vast majority of luxury brands still pushing back on digital (frequently, I heard comments like: the Internet is not for us, we want our customers to come to our stores to experience the brand and the product, e-commerce is for CDs and books, I have better things to do than setting up a website I need to open more stores in China). Today, everyone is bending over backwards to convince the market they have set digital as their number one priority. The mere notion of luxury retail without m-commerce, e-commerce and a fully integrated digital service in-store (buy online, pick-up in-store; buy online, return in-store; order in-store for home/hotel delivery) is tantamount to the idea we should commute to the office every day on horseback. It is not just yesterday's story; it is utterly and completely obsolete. Either you have a fully developed digital retail strategy and activity, or you are not in a condition to play. Hence, the need to think through what the right digital strategy and the right digital activity should mean for the specifics of your brand and your business.

Second and linked to the point above physical retail network development in luxury goods is virtually done, at least for the foreseeable future. We have seen for a number of years that the largest luxury brands haven't added any stores to their total. Actually, most have been in trimming mode, reducing one or two stores here and there. A case in point is the network consolidation that has been going on in China, hand in hand with a Darwinian fight among luxury shopping malls, which has led to a shake-out and survival of the fittest. When we look at who has been leading store openings in the past five years, we find two kinds: (a) up-and-coming smaller brands that have been able to strike gold (Moncler, Saint Laurent, Celine, Balenciaga); (b) accessible luxury brands that have built their networks worldwide (a case in point, Michael Kors). The point here is that everyone else has been confronted with a relatively static store base and a completely new set of challenges versus the previous expansion era.

In fact, during the expansion phase, most brands were concerned about attaining comparable standards all across the world. Store appearance and in-store service was supposed to be of a similar level, anywhere in the world. So much so, that store blueprints and selling ceremony handbooks were created. One could say, most brands used a cookie-cutter approach to store expansion. The advantage, of course, was consistency. The disadvantage and this is becoming all too obvious today was a risk of boring customers and failing to drive in-store traffic. Why on earth should I go and visit a store in Milan, New York or L.A., when it is virtually identical and actually a tad smaller than the one I have close to me in Shanghai? And why should I go to a store in the first place, when I can buy what I need online, and when I can touch and see the products while I go through the airport in their airside locations?

Brands today are confronted with a new task: how to make their stores unique and interesting enough so that customers continue to be keen to visit them