Digital IQ Rating of Luxury Brands

Trying to find the fashion companies who are doing a good job of exploiting e-commerce and social media opportunities, I have stumbled across a very interesting study done by NYU's Stern School of Business. This study rates the digital competence of 109 luxury brands in 11 categories grouped into four criteria:

1. Search Engine Optimization
2. Brand Translation
3. Leveraging the Medium
4. Social Media

The following table shows how fashion brands were ranked among other luxury brands:


Only Louis Vuitton and Ralph Lauren made it in the Top 10 of luxury brands that were rated in this study. I was not surprised that consumer electronics such as Apple (rank #1) are doing a better job in exploiting the Internet opportunities. But should automotive companies such as BMW (rank #2) and Audi (rank #4) perform better than fashion companies? Would we not expect fashion companies who are supposed to be the masters of image creation to rank higher?

The comment on Marc Jacobs online appearance: “no e-commerce capacity; site is little more than a digital runway show” was relatively brutal. I think that all the low ranked high-end fashion companies should definitely look into this study and try to benchmark and compare themselves with competitors inside and outside the fashion industry.