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This is one of the six chapters comprising the Vogue Business Index: Spring/Summer 2023 edition and should be read in conjunction with the others. Please use the table of contents below to navigate between the chapters of the Vogue Business Index: Spring/Summer 2023 edition.
Key takeaways:
- Speak TikTok’s language: The best-performing brands on TikTok have hired relevant celebrities, recreated TikTok memes and developed specialised short-form video content. As TikTok increasingly overtakes Instagram for relevance in many countries, targeted TikTok strategies are key for brands looking to continue reaching Gen Z consumers.
- Korean culture keeps winning: Many brands are getting more attention for their posts when they use K-pop stars such as BTS and Blackpink rather than celebrities from the West. Appointing new brand ambassadors from the country still seems like a surefire win, given the continued growth of the Korean luxury market and the popularity of Korea’s cultural output to fans worldwide.
- Marketing quiet luxury: ‘Quiet luxury’, high quality but understated in style, is the trend on everyone’s lips — and brands seen as “timeless and classic” by consumers, such as Prada, are likely to perform well. Brands that reflect this trend must find a way of emphasising their quality, heritage and craftsmanship through their marketing strategies, given that is ultimately what drives affinity with the majority of luxury consumers worldwide.
Instagram declines, TikTok rises
TikTok has upended the social media marketing landscape and changed the way many brands operate online. The platform is being included in the Vogue Business Index for the first time in this edition, with its unique appeal now reflected in the scoring.
On TikTok, creativity and humour matter as much as image quality, meaning independent brands targeting younger consumers have a far better chance of competing with more established fashion powerhouses than they do on other platforms like Facebook and Instagram.
The highest-scoring brand on TikTok is Hugo Boss, also outperforming its own results on all other social media platforms. This is a result of the hyper-focused TikTok strategy of its rebrand with its millennial-aimed Boss and Gen Z-targeted Hugo last year.
One of its first major moves as part of the new business strategy was to recruit TikTok star creator Khaby Lame as a partner for Boss, and the brand has easily settled into the vocabulary of the social media platform more generally, posting celeb-driven, offbeat and fast-paced videos much to the delight of its fanbase. The brand even integrated Zach King, a creator of short-form illusion-based videos, into its AW22 fashion show, with King appearing to float onto the runway. Hugo has a smaller following on the platform despite its Gen Z focus but similarly recruits TikTok stars, including singer and military vet Bella Poarch, for its flagship campaigns. Salvatore Ferragamo and Tod’s are among the other brands performing better on TikTok than they are on Instagram.
Trending fashion topics on TikTok often revolve around how-to-wear or “fashion hacks” content. Smaller brands that are able to tap into these subjects are capable of significant lifts in viewer numbers.
Big names still dominate for the most part, with the top five brands (Boss, Prada, Louis Vuitton, Gucci and Dior) having more views than all of the other fashion houses combined. All five brands have tailored TikTok strategies, such as getting show attendees to use “Three words to describe Prada” or Gucci enlisting actor Julia Garner and singer Hanni to answer “21 Questions”.
The effort that these leading luxury names are putting in demonstrates the importance of TikTok as a platform for the industry. Forecasts suggest advertising revenue from TikTok will overtake Meta by 2027. A continuing trend is that brands are reducing the number of posts they are publishing on Facebook and Instagram — a sign of new priorities in social media marketing.
TikTok requires a tailored strategy centred on native content. Several luxury brands post frequently on the video-sharing platform but fail to get anywhere near as much engagement as they do on Instagram. Simply posting the same videos across platforms is a no-no; brands need to develop their own unique voice and tone for their TikTok account.
Meanwhile, there are also some regulatory pitfalls associated with the platform. The US state of Montana announced a ban on TikTok in May, with the US government also having threatened similar sanctions. Several other countries have banned the app on state devices, and wider concern seems to be growing around the impact of social media on young people’s mental health.
Korea and celebrity power
The most impactful celebrity endorsements in fashion have one thing in common right now — they are all from Korea.
Blackpink headlining Coachella underlined how important K-pop has become to the cultural landscape internationally. The band took to the stage in matching Mugler bodysuits, with individual members picking a number of different brands for solo outfits, including Jimmy Choo, Paco Rabanne and Aadnevik. It also helped to shine a light on the brands that the band members are ambassadors for — Chanel (Jennie), Saint Laurent (Rosé), Dior (Jisoo) and Celine (Lisa).
Fashion brands’ increasing love affair with K-pop and Korean film stars is partially driven by a desire to deepen links with the country, given its strong affinity for luxury. Korean nationals are estimated to be responsible for at least 10 per cent of total luxury retail sales, with an extremely high per capita spend — and the market is still forecast to grow. Both Louis Vuitton and Gucci recently staged their first major show in the country. Ralph Lauren and Tod’s are among the brands that are particularly popular in South Korea.
These brand partnerships also reflect the huge international appeal that Korean culture now has globally. Many of the most-liked posts on fashion brands’ Instagram pages have featured a K-pop star, whether it is Jisoo’s outfit on the Dior AW23 carpet (3.8 million likes); the announcement of BTS member Jimin as a Dior brand ambassador (4.2 million); his bandmate J-Hope joining the Louis Vuitton brand ambassador roster (5.5 million); or Exo singer Kai on the Gucci AW23 carpet (1.1 million).
Around a quarter (24 per cent) of luxury consumers aged 18 to 24 say that celebrities help them find out information about fashion brands. Chinese shoppers of all ages (32 per cent) are even more likely to cite celebrities, with Brazilians also more likely to be influenced by celebrities (25 per cent) than the global average (18 per cent).
The power of Chinese celebrity ambassadors and key opinion leaders remains clear — a December jewellery and watch campaign for Dior featuring actor Jiang Shuying saw a 2,000 per cent increase in Wechat searches and the highest interest on Wechat of any brand during the period tracked. Similarly, a Canada Goose campaign featuring beauty bloggers @Xuhmmmm and @NickWong led to a near-8000 per cent increase in Wechat searches for the brand. Burberry meanwhile just announced that actor Chen Kun has become its first Chinese ambassador in two years (some stars severed links with the British brand in 2021 due to its involvement with the Better Cotton Initiative after the organisation took a hard line on cotton from the Xinjiang region). However, with ongoing uncertainty around government crackdowns on celebrities with “lapsed morals” in China, as well as the broader international success of Korean culture, K-Pop stars currently appear to be a stronger bet on the whole.
Fashion is also leveraging celebrity culture by plucking stars from breakout shows on Netflix. Both Gucci and Dior have seen high-performing posts during the research period featuring Jenna Ortega, star of hit show Wednesday. Emily in Paris lead Lily Collins has also appeared on both brands’ socials in recent months. Balmain went as far as to make a capsule collaboration with Stranger Things, and Prada recruited one of the show’s stars, Maya Hawke, as a brand ambassador.
Prada leads quiet luxury trend with understated pieces
Prada has entered fourth place in the digital rankings, making it the highest-rated brand that is not a member of the Kering or LVMH families. The brand nailed the “quiet luxury” trend at Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons’s latest runway show, focusing on workwear-inspired looks ahead of maximalist cuts and colours. Quiet luxury is typically characterised by classic and timeless fashion, understated clothes and accessories produced to an extremely high quality.
People are paying far more attention to Prada as this trend takes hold, with traffic to the brand’s website from Google up 11 per cent in the six months to April versus the same period in 2022. Prada Group, which also includes fellow Index brand Miu Miu, saw revenues rise last year by 21 per cent. On top of its relevant selection of looks, Prada was among the first to start running events again in China and is reaping the rewards with a 22 per cent uplift in sales in the Asia-Pacific region in Q1 2023 on top of the same period in 2022.
Quiet luxury is also finding favour among viewers on Vogue Runway, where Balmain and Saint Laurent have registered the highest scores (determined by a number of factors, including unique visits and quarter-on-quarter growth) for the summer 2023 edition of the Index. In winter 2022, attention-grabbing outfits by Balenciaga and Dolce Gabbana were the preferred pick of visitors to the Vogue galleries.
Amplifying quiet luxury is a more nuanced challenge than offering more quirky products, full of colour or with more obvious brand signifiers or logos. Bold products and ad campaigns that have gone viral over the past few years — from cartoon-influenced designs such as Mschf’s “Big Red Boots” to statement campaigns like Jacquemus’s motorised handbags — make it even harder to stand out for brands looking to simply focus on the quality of the product.
Clever celebrity curation and a focus on product quality is key to quiet luxury. Brands that are viewed as timeless, with a strong heritage, creating high-quality products and giving best-in-class customer service, are also the most favoured by luxury customers worldwide.
Case study: Burberry relaunches — but with nods to the past
Heritage was the keyword of the Burberry relaunch after the introduction of new creative director Daniel Lee. The launch campaign coincided with a significant strengthening of the brand’s digital performance, and it entered the top 10 for digital after rising four places to seventh position.
Since winter 2022, Burberry has seen a 1,000 per cent rise in Facebook interactions, while likes and shares per post on Instagram went up from around 24,000 to 28,000. The brand is among the best performers on TikTok already, and in China, it was the best performer on Wechat (based on a scoring system involving searches, reads and growth). The brand saw a big rise in interest in October after it posted a sci-fi-inspired dance film produced in collaboration with creative studio Megaforce.
There are some signs Lee and new CEO Jonathan Akeroyd are trying to achieve something similar to the brand reinvention that took place while the designer was at Bottega Veneta, where he managed to both lean into the brand’s history of leather craft excellence while making it feel buzzy and new.
Take, for instance, the redesign of the brand’s logo, which reintroduces the classic horseback knight from Burberry’s past and uses a royal blue font that looks more handmade than its previous serif design, which was more reminiscent of a tech company like Apple or Microsoft. A similar interplay of history and youthful energy was at work in Lee’s first collection for the brand, pairing the Burberry check with striking colour choices. His runway images were viewed 26 per cent more times on Vogue Runway than those from his predecessor Riccardo Tisci’s last show in September.
Burberry’s choice of celebrities is playful and creative, leaning into the zeitgeist while hyping up links to British culture — its Korean ambassador star during its relaunch was English Premier League footballer Son Heung-Min, and on TikTok, its best-performing post during the six months tracked saw celebrity fox @kikithefox_ napping on a Burberry scarf.
Burberry is respected by luxury consumers worldwide, but they are less likely to recommend it to family and friends than other top-tier brands like Dior, Louis Vuitton and Chanel. It also scores below average for a sense of elevated status consumers think the brand confers. Addressing these issues is key if Lee wants to take Burberry to new heights. His experience in leather goods and handbags is likely to be crucial if Burberry wants to start matching the leading luxury names.
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