Luxury brands’ social media strategy: globalization or localization?

According to “The World’s Ten Most Powerful Luxury Brands: 2011 Edition” (http://fashionista.com/2011/05/the-worlds-ten-most-powerful-luxury-brands-2011/2/), Louis Vuitton, Hermès, Gucci rank Top 3, and other famous brands such as Chanel, Cartier, Rolex, etc. are also so powerful that are ranked from 4 to 10. Research shows the contribution of more than half of these 10 brands can be traced directly to Asia especially by the renewed interest in China, which include Louis Vuitton, Hermès, Cartier, Hennessy, Fendi, and Burberry, as can be seen in the following table.

Top 10 Luxury Brands (2011)		Compare with the ranking of last year	Global social media platform (i.e. Facebook)	Asian market (especially China) contribute most to this ranking	Local social media platform (i.e. Sina Weibo in China)
1	Louis Vuitton	→	√	√	√
2	Hermès	→	√	√	×
3	Gucci	→	√	×	√
4	Chanel	→	√	×	×
5	Cartier	↑	√	√	×
6	Rolex	→	√	×	×
7	Hennessy	↓	√	√	×
8	Moët & Chandon	↓	√	×	×
9	Fendi	→	√	√	×
10	Burberry	↑Up 86% unranked last year	√	√	√

As shown in the table, compared with last year, all brands have more or less some gains with the exception of only two. Two reasons for this include great appetite for luxury in Asia, especially in China, and the increasing enthusiasm for social media. Luxury brands are wary of the social realm for fear that it will dilute their exclusivity, but many have successfully made the foray into social marketing this year. As a result, all these Top 10 brands have their pages on Facebook. But does this world-wide social media platform really work well for Asia? The answer is not exactly.

Whether going globalization or localization as social media marketing strategy for these Top 10 luxury brands is an issue that I will discuss. As mentioned in previous blogs, almost every world-wide social media is restricted in China. What really widely spreading in China is Sina Weibo, which has gained much popularity in China since 2010, attracting millions of users who have extended its use beyond social networking and turned it into a media platform. But searching Sina Weibo, I have only found three brands set up their pages there, which are Louis Vuitton, Gucci, as well as Burberry. Similar to what can be found in their Facebook pages, what these brands put mostly on Sina Weibo are new products introduction, brand history popularization, commercial photography and also various brands dynamic. Among these three brands, Burberry owns the largest amount of followers in Sina Weibo, which are 182,250 while Louis Vuitton owns 113, 500 and Gucci owns 53,040. As clearly shown in the above table, Burberry shoots greatly up by 86% though it is new to the list this year. And obviously its sales profit mainly come from China, so we can boldly assume that the innovative way Burberry localise its social media platform by making good us of the social media that enjoys the greatest popularity among the locals is one of the reasons that drive its status this year.

How to go localization? The significant step is to find the social media platform that is locally popular in order to draw enough attention to the brand. Besides what is put up should be carefully edited about brand-related information to meet both global interest and local taste so as to make good combination of localization and globalization.