Managing Luxury Brands in the Digital Environment

For a long time, luxury firms were reluctant to approach the online environment and digital tecnologies and some of them still have negative attitudes toward investing in e-commerce since an easy availability of products might negatively affect their prestige. However, the profound changes in customer behaviors have pushed traditional luxury companies to catch the creative and commercial opportunities of the digital environment. The aim of this chapter is to analyse the opportunities of the digital environment in managing consumer relations from a corporate perspective. Findings indicate that digital technologies provide luxury firms with access to invaluable customer data and many tools and platforms where to interact with customers for purposes of: global brand management, competitive environment monitoring, consumer web analytics, marketing communication and retailing. Thus, the question is no longer if and when luxury brands should embrace the digital opportunity, but how they should operate in the digital environment to improve their global brand positioning.