Thursday, November 19, 2009

From Couture to Conversation

In my last post I have been blogging about a study that rated the digital competence of 109 luxury brands, some of them being fashion companies. The fashion company with the third highest rating (rank #11) was Gucci and today I totally understand why.

Gucci introduced its latest line of eyewear with a viral ad campaign by launching a website called guccieyeweb.com. This site lets visitors upload their own party pictures of which some of them will be chosen by Gucci and displayed on the website as if they were reflections in the various new eyewear styles. And this is how it looks like:


Patrizio di Marco, Gucci’s president, sees this initiative as a "tactical web promotion." According to him, guccieyeweb.com is a component of an integrated marketing plan for the launch of Gucci’s new youth-oriented sunglass collection. As social networking is an important activity for this target demographic today, this component has been the heart of the marketing plan. He also elaborates on the fact that the investment in building and maintaining this site equals to a handful pages in a traditional marketing campaign. Given that this site can be reached internationally, this investment can be highly efficient.

This is another example how companies step away from traditional marketing communication to more conversational marketing. This campaign is entirely build on customer involvement and would not work without customers' willingness to share their personal pictures. I am not sure if this campaign will be a success. What I am sure though is that Gucci will be able to easily track the conversion rate as each site of guccieyeweb.com shows the direct link to the online shop.

I could not hold off myself to test this website and to upload some of my pictures. Let’s see if I get picked by Gucci… I’ll keep you posted!

Found via The New York Times

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