Leading luxury brand creates Digital Flagship destination

30 Aug '10

6 min read

In the new Digital Flagship, inspiration and product are never far apart. The “World of Gucci” brings the House to life through five different areas: Gucci Forever, which delves into every aspect of Gucci's 90 year history; Gucci Now, which updates visitors on news, events and fashion shows; Think Forever, which spotlights artistic and environmental initiatives; Act Now, which highlights philanthropic efforts; and Gucci Connect, which includes distributed digital content. The integration of social media such as a live Twitter feed, an interface with the Gucci official Facebook fan page, and product page links to ready-to-wear items straight off the catwalk, allow visitors to truly engage with the brand.

Patrizio di Marco, Gucci's President and CEO said, "Gucci is a company with a deep respect for the past but at the same time with an eye firmly focused on the future. We see technology as offering a means to an end. It is not the end itself. The customer experience is what counts and what has to be the focus. With the ubiquity of broadband today and the widespread adoption of social networking we have aimed to develop a rich and connected online experience that reflects the height of luxury and service one experiences when entering our flagship retail stores.”

Di Marco continued, “Our strategy online is clear: all paths lead to our Digital Flagship, whether you are seeking out Gucci through a search engine, or are one of our near 1 million Facebooks fans, or are one of the over 600,000 people who have downloaded our Gucci App or are one of our 18,000 Twitter followers. The destiny of the gucci.com Digital Flagship store is that it will become our highest volume store in the world."

An integrated marketing and communications plan to support the opening of the new Digital Flagship launches on September 1st with a groundbreaking invitation to attend Frida Giannini's next women's ready-to-wear fashion show as a virtual guest at gucciconnect.com, an innovative hologram window display in signature retail locations, in-store iPad stations and a viral welcome video among a wide range of other activities. As with other flasghip store openings Frida Giannini has designed an exclusive collection of accessories in celebration, which in thus case are only available for purchase online.

Gucci was in fact a pioneer when it launched its US e-commerce site in 2002. The current site operates in 17 countries in 8 different languages, while e-commerce is offered in 12 countries. With over 2,000 skus available online the gucci.com site is considered one of the benchmarks of the luxury fashion industry. One of the reasons Gucci has been successful in attracting new customers is because of the attention paid to the internet. Through the site, Facebook, Twitter and the Gucci App, the brand reaches a growing digitally-oriented customer in a very direct and content rich way.

The GucciOfficial page on Facebook has over 900,000 fans and is growing steadily. At the end of June, the Gucci App, which is updated every two months, counts more than 600,000 downloads and over 1,100,000 updates. Innovative media and technology represent a valuable complementary business channel as well as a vital way of communicating.

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