-: Sarah, welcome.
What are the marketing trends in luxury
that you are most excited by at the moment?
-: Hi, Georgie.
Thanks for having me.
I'm excited by a lot, I mean, in some ways,
luxury will continue doing what it's great at doing,
investing in inspiring consumers and not pulling back,
because actually, luxury's never been about
just performance marketing.
It's been a much more about brand and product marketing
as well as sales.
I think some of the trends I'm most excited by
would be 360 brand building.
So, we see a continued investment in experiences,
things that bring together community,
destination shows, things like that.
So, I think there's a lot of,
now that we're well post-Covid,
bringing everyone to back in-person around experiences.
There is a doubling down on VIC,
so, Very Important Clients,
and that's somewhat a sales and a marketing initiative,
but it's certainly, a one-to-one relationship
that's invested in from a marketing perspective.
I am personally still excited by Web3
and what that's going to mean.
I know we often speak about
the crypto winter or the Web3 winter,
but actually, as a tool for digital identity
and customer experience and engagement,
I do believe that's going to continue
being important for luxury.
-: Are you seeing an impact now with gen AI
or is it more about what you think
the impact will be on the future?
-: Both, most brands, with gen AI,
most brands in luxury are testing and trialing things.
But actually, as I always say,
the biggest challenge with gen AI
is not necessarily the technology
although that's certainly evolving.
It's actually changing the processes in the organization,
because at the end of the day,
you're adapting how someone does their job.
And hopefully, you're taking away
some of the more repetitive things
and giving more time to spend
on higher impact, more creative things.
But if you think about in luxury for things like
initial drafts of copy editing,
different versioning of assets,
these are things where generative AI
will be able to help us.
I think then in the future,
it'll be much more embedded into many aspects,
but in luxury, I hope that
we always focus on quality and creativity and design
and some of that could, obviously, be done by gen AI,
but it's also going be about
the vision of the creative director
and about the design and creativity of the brand.
-: In terms of the current economic climate
and the last few years have been incredibly disruptive.
We're expecting that to continue.
Tough, uncertain economic times and social times.
How has luxury managed that, weathered that storm?
How has it changed?
How do you see the future?
-: Well, so luxury has thus far weathered the storm very well
as you've probably seen
by any of the companies who report publicly.
To some extent, it's been a huge period of growth
and actually, luxury recovered more quickly
than many other industries.
It's very volatile right now.
It's volatile not just from an economic perspective,
but a geopolitical perspective.
Some of the ways they're weathering are scale.
Scale is tremendously important
and there are a number of big conglomerates
that have many brands and in some ways
that scale is really enabling them
to weather the storm well.
We're seeing a lot of supply chain consolidation.
So, continued vertical integration
and owning your manufacturing and things like that.