Rising income in emerging markets is driving strong demand for luxury goods. But as luxury brands chase more consumers, balancing evolving demand against brand values and the risk of overexposure will be critical.

Luxury has always been cyclical. But the sector’s amazing growth hit the buffers last year.

Asian consumers reined in their spending. Volatile exchange rates rained on consumer confidence. And the battle for customer loyalty – in an ever-increas-ing competitive marketplace – hit gale force.

But that was 2013. Which means this New Year, as consumer confidence returns, is great timing for renewed emphasis on building an unfair advantage for your brand as new opportunities emerge at home and abroad.

As a digital, data and social media agency, our work with Glenfiddich in this sector has a great deal of relevance to other luxury brands.

We’ve taken a look at how luxury brands can exploit the internet’s unstoppable growth in social media to enhance their online presence and build upon their reputation.

IN A WORLD OF SHARING…

…brands can no longer resist the greater openness and accessibility expected from consumers.

The disruptive power of the internet has changed everything. This means that the new world's dyna-mism, volatility and complexity no longer offers luxury brands the luxury of choice when it comes to whether they should change their traditional marketing practices or not.

It’s not news but everyone has to adapt.

CONTROL AND WHAT WE CALL 'UN-CONTROL'

Brands want customers to follow them. To engage with them. Be hungry for information about them. Which they can pass on to their friends.

But brands also want to follow and engage with customers as never before. We've proved this with Glenfiddich. Brands also need to locate and create relationships with influential and respected social media 'activists'. We organise this, too.

How Exclusivity Can Co-exist with Democracy

In their turn, customers are happy to engage with brands. But at the very least, brands have to be interesting. Meet customers on their level. Our snapshot of the chattering, moneyed, classes who are your customers demonstrates their willingness to be actively involved and seriously engaged on social media.

This means brands have to accept that they can 'let themselves go' a bit. And reap the rewards of conse-quent customer un-control. Because that's what customers are doing.

Glenfiddich 38 Years Old 600 Limited Edition only available in China. HK$55.000 - HK$99.000

www.gravitythinking.com

LUXURY BRANDS AS ‘PUBLISHERS’

With Glenfiddich, and our other clients, success is based upon keeping customers' interests foremost. At all times.

We know their preferences, their needs, their desire for continuing, quality, useful and enter-taining content. So we tell engaging stories.

We know you’re not in the publishing business...

...so please don’t get alarmed. But the analogy is relevant: just as publishers know they have to keep their readers interested, so too must brands if they are going to achieve a position of value and trust in their customers' minds. But in their own way.

So all of your heritage, craftsmanship, artisanal values, provenance and authenticity is invaluable content. And is shouting to be shared. It's what we do for Glenfid-dich. But with style and respect and some dignity!

Take Facebook, as an example: luxury brands probably stand to benefit most from timeline as

their image is normally built on a historical legacy of quality products and good service. We checked to see which brands might be taking advantage of this opportunity. As we can share with you if we meet, the results are quite underwhelming!

Staying alert to everything that the customer may want, therefore, what they say and find useful is key. We can achieve this via our proprie-tary web-based social listening software. We'd love to demonstrate this for you.

INTELLIGENT ADAPTATION RATHER THAN BRUTAL CHANGE

We know you'll be aware of all this. But it may be that you need some extra help. We've put together a short presentation on how we can support your aims to build a greater online presence but without diluting or losing any of your precious brand equity.

We'd love to share all of this over a cup of coffee with you. And swap some anecdotes, perhaps, too!

If you'd like to see some further examples of how we help Glenfiddich make news (and sell more whisky) around the world, you might care to click on the following:

bit.ly/1m8AAbC

huff.to/1fAZcMA

dailym.ai/K5AANN

www.gravitythinking.comwww.gravitythinking.com