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On 13 June 2023, Vogue Business hosted the first Power to the Marketer Festival in partnership with omnichannel customer engagement platform Emarsys, at Famtain private members club in Munich. The first of three events, which will also travel to New York and London later this year, featured a host of German and international luxury brands across fashion, beauty and motoring. Vogue Business head of advisory Anusha Couttigane hosted the event, which spanned four sessions exploring omnichannel excellence, investing to win in a cut-back economy, how to make data your secret weapon and the new language of loyalty. The running theme throughout the day was how to elevate the art and science of marketing.
The first session, a fireside chat featuring Daniel Lang, head of marketing and development and co-founder of Parfumdreams, explored how the online beauty and fragrance giant pivoted during the pandemic to reinforce its business model to serve customers exclusively online. In many ways, the business was already set up to do this well, but challenges including creating an immersive experience for this particularly sensory-led category remained. Lang spoke about how activity from rivals kept the business sharp, by introducing 180-day returns policies when a competitor offered 90 days, for instance. He also spoke about experiments with new forms of customer service and technology like AR try-on for cosmetics, which has not yet been perfected, but could play a vital role as the industry develops.
Lang explained that the metrics of success have also changed: “Back in the day, it was about how to bring the conversion rate up to XYZ per cent, even on the first contact. Now, it’s more or less about how to keep the customer with us for a longer time. This is the major change we had.” That noted, Lang acknowledged that the cosmetic category is highly resilient: “We are the perfect replenishment case. The moment you know which fragrance you are rooting for or which make-up fits perfectly your needs, you have to buy it somewhere. If we make it easy for you guys to purchase it online within two to five clicks and get it home the next day, it’s a piece of cake.” However, he also outlined Parfumdreams’ ambition to become a stronger point of inspiration for customers: “And this is the main challenge, how to get new products, innovations or ideas and also a lot of content with added value to the customer to keep them on the webshop, so to not only be the replenishment case.”
The second session brought together Kerstin Weng, head of editorial content at Vogue Germany, and Benjamin Messner, director of e-commerce at German luxury outdoors brand Bogner, for a dynamic discussion about e-commerce functionality and the role of content in elevating customer experiences. During the discussion about investing to win in a cut-back economy, Messner spoke about how Bogner divested its HQ building during the pandemic, which released resources to invest in the new tools the business needed to remain relevant. “We were the only channel that was able to generate revenue during that time, so the survival of the company depended on it. The team did a great job creating all the processes that we needed, but of course we could have done more. If our technology stack and the whole platform was where we wanted it to be, we probably could have turned our stores into fulfillment centres back then, but we weren’t able to do that.” Nevertheless, in its latest results, Bogner’s revenue outperformed pre-pandemic levels. Messner alluded to how the business now invests in the attention economy: “We invest heavily in performance marketing, we invest in CRM, but we also do things like the fashion show we hosted in Hofbräuhaus [Munich], which was 75 years after Maria Bogner had done that for the first time in the exact same venue.”
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Meanwhile, Weng suggested that culture is having a big impact on brand campaigns: “What we see is a really strong interest among luxury brands in cultural moments. So, for example, Gucci became the main sponsor of Gallery Weekend [Berlin] this year. Chanel is very involved in the [Venice] Biennale. Max Mara is supporting the Hollywood foundation Women in Film… each brand is looking into supporting or being present at different cultural moments.” Similarly, Bogner is focused on creating more entertaining content, e.g. Bogner World, an important asset on the direct-to-consumer site that the brand uses to curate content. Messner added: “Way up the funnel we have social media, where we need to use content in a different way to make it fit the channels. But then, we combine everything in that one place and we curate it in a way that you can filter for different interests and needs.”
The second panel of the day featured two international guests — Lennart Müller-Teut, CMO of Akris, and Alim Adam Nait, worldwide digital engagement manager at Saint Laurent. The discussion, focused on how to make data your secret weapon, surfaced different ideas about how to measure success, but also how to translate data into meaningful, actionable information for non-data-fluent stakeholders. Müller-Teut, who previously held senior marketing roles at Mercedes Benz, spoke about how he brought lessons from his time in motoring, where he had used unique data sets such as how customers configured features on their cars to build a predictive analytics model to optimise sales.
Having joined Akris just last year, Müller-Teut outlined the initial process he went through when taking on the new role: “I was pleasantly surprised how advanced and forward-thinking this brand is. I mean it’s a third-generation family brand, but also very digital. So, whenever you try to set up a new digital operation in an organisation you have a few key tasks. The first one could be building the right infrastructure and architecture… The second one is how do we process data? How do we collate it? And the third one is something I think is overlooked a lot — how can we make big data small data? Because big data is just a vast wealth of information. So, our aim is to make it small data, meaning can I find something interesting? Can I draw conclusions from what I see? Do I recognise certain patterns from our customers? All of these help me to make better decisions.”
Nait, who has worked in the luxury segment for a number of years, spoke about how digital was not part of the vision when he first joined the brand. “It was still very much traditional communication, even clienteling and CRM was sending look books and hand-written notes. However, when you want to address the masses you cannot ask all of your sales associates to spend hours writing hand-written notes.” He added that two key things changed — first, the fact that competition was using digital to grow faster. Secondly, the positioning of Saint Laurent (not as elevated as Hermès but not as digital-first as Jacquemus) enabled it to be more agile. “We are very lucky to be part of Kering as a group and Monsieur Pinault has created this digital factory, which basically works for all the houses… and they have brought in people like Grégory Boutté, our chief digital officer.” New talent and thinking is therefore supporting innovation and digital advancements across the maisons.
Nait explained how the brand used data to create more segmentation, around purchasing behaviour for instance. He also spoke transparently about the gap between perception and ambition and the reality of customer behaviour, in that the ambition might be that everyone who walks through the door will want the full Saint Laurent silhouette, but the reality may be that they’re seeking just their status handbag. This realisation changed the brand’s communication strategy; for example, when it came to focusing more on handbags as the gateway category. Globally, the handbag category revealed a lot about Saint Laurent’s customers, but in China and Asia more widely it is shoes that are driving demand for the brand and the data helps to expose this differentiation.
In the final session, Vogue Business’s Couttigane hosted a keynote interview with Jennifer Treiber-Ruckenbrod, CMO of BMW Germany, on cultivating lingering and longing through the new language of loyalty. During this conversation, Treiber-Ruckenbrod explained that each of the car brands in the BMW portfolio, whether BMW, Mini or Rolls Royce, has its own loyal following and one of her first tasks was to create segmentations against the different personalities of these brand loyalists. She went on to elaborate on the BMW Excellence Club, a loyalty programme that offers exclusive experiences and cultivates a brand-centric community among its top-paying customers. “We started 11 years ago with the excellence circle, I think with 700. Now, we have a membership of 7,000 that’s increasing from year to year with each new model… What we offer them is an experience once a year, like fine dining, arts, sports experiences, driving experiences, for free, with a great hotel, a cool network.” She added that the opportunity to bring a friend or recommend a guest has grown its word-of-mouth advocacy among its most affluent customers and has not only had a positive impact on sales, but also brought BMW much closer to its customers.
When asked about how BMW creates a single view of the customer when they’re researching online but visiting showrooms to complete sales, Treiber-Ruckenbrod says that more sales are heading in the direction of online, and not just to dealerships. The nature of selling cars has changed a lot, she added: in the past visiting a dealership was about getting the best price, but luxury doesn’t work when the price has to be negotiated and now the brand’s associates focus on experiences, test-drives and the features of the car.
By taking this approach, she says: “We learned in the last two years that [offering negotiable prices] is not necessary and you can earn a lot more money selling less cars. We reduced the number of clicks and the number of packages to reduce the complexity, but on the other side you can offer some films, you can offer some experiences. You need events, you need to touch the car, it’s a whole ecosystem. It’s the lifestyle of the brand.” BMW has also invested in apps for each brand, which deliver content, invitations to events and services, such as car servicing appointments. The most recent addition has been a community feature that facilitates relationships between loyal customers who share feedback and photos of their own experiences with their cars. This community has become a fundamental part of the brand experience for many customers. “It’s an experience you cannot really buy. It’s special. It’s about the people you can meet. I think when it comes to luxury, you have to do this, and my aim for the future is to go more in this direction.”
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