Luxury brands in Italy, known for their tradition and quality, face challenges in integrating influencer marketing into their strategies. With a history of manual, volume-based approaches, there’s a clear need for advanced, analytics-driven platforms to foster long-term, meaningful relationships with influencers. Embracing such tools will help Italian luxury brands craft globally relevant yet locally tailored campaigns, preserving their heritage while expanding their reach.
Published On: May 14, 2017
This post was originally posted on LinkedIn by Founder & CEO of Wearisma, Jenny Tsai.
With over 75% of wealthy internet shoppers actively using social media, we no longer question if luxury brands should be on social. Nowadays, these brands are thinking critically about how (and where) they engage online and what the impact is. Off the back of our fruitful trip to Japan, Wearisma headed to the headquarters of luxury: Milan. Continuing conversations with top names in the industry, we’ve gained valuable insight on the influencer marketing world in Italy, and how it can roll out globally.
Luxury in Italy has always been synonymous with tradition, quality and exclusivity. Many labels are still family-run and place a lot of emphasis on control in order to preserve their history and output. We met with luxury brands where decisions are closely supervised by the HQ – from fabric sourcing and design to operations and reporting. This business style positions major Italian brands in stark contrast to the likes of the French, where conglomerates reign. The inherent ‘insider’s club’ in Italy shines through in the marketing methods of premium brands. All those glossy magazine spreads and dreamy adverts were designed to make us lust and aspire for products so well-made, they might just be out of reach.
Italian luxury brands market themes like craftsmanship and tradition that are passed down from generation to generation. They also seek globally consistent messaging. So it comes as no surprise that some luxury brands in Italy have been slower to embrace new (and highly impactful) social media marketing techniques that hinge on micro-influence. When your brand is a carefully preserved, age-old family affair, how do you cope with something so novel and localised as influencer marketing? But as 65% of luxury buyers in 2016 say they were digitally influenced, working with influencers is a no-brainer. Italian brands have begun to implement influencer marketing campaigns to build brand awareness and seek new methods of engagement locally on a global scale.
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Influencer marketing is revving up in Italy. However, the main challenge here is to instill an understanding of the history, personality and significance of the brand through influencers with candid, local audiences. Because craftsmanship and tradition trump scale in Italy, premium brands are entering the influencer space with care. What’s more, they must find a personality that blends well with their ethos.
When 73% of fashion and beauty marketers struggle to identify the right influencers, a one-size-fits-all approach simply won’t work. Brands want to find, control and nurture unique and relevant talent so that it credibly represents their carefully crafted story over time. “We want to find Madonna before she writes Like a Virgin,” one brand told us. Industry research supports this mentality: “influencer marketing in the luxury world is truly about collaboration and affinity. Identifying and selecting the right partners will require in depth analysis, and long term monitoring,” Digital Marketing Magazine points out.
That being said, we witnessed a clear gap between what Italian luxury brands want and the status quo. Here’s the current set-up, which is effectively a volume-play, not a quality play:
What we learned: when it comes to influencer marketing in Italy, the offering does not enable luxury brands to identify and build long-term relationships with relevant influencers over time. They either work with the celebrity-like, top-tier talent in the most manual, unscalable manner or with micro-influencers in a blanket, automated, mercenary manner, without no control brand risk.
Don’t worry – growing pains happen in every market when new forms emerge, and this is no exception. Luxury brands in Italy have a clear idea of what they’d like to achieve from influencer marketing. They just need the right tools to help them achieve their long term goals.
The wheels are greased, the budgets are ready – now luxury brands need to embrace analytics-backed, enterprise-strength platforms that can deliver sustainable, long-term results. Influencer marketing platforms can enable powerful, localised content that is selected, curated and nurtured at the HQ, so we’ll all know it has the quality and status of luxury items that are “Made in Italy” while being locally relevant. Forget the current status quo volume-play model and instead gather strategic portfolios of local influencers who can grow your business worldwide. Our message to brands preserving their history through marketing: explore platforms that can match you with the relevant influencers just for you, and tell your story together over time.
Keep informed with the latest trends, reports, and case studies from the world of influencer marketing.
Both influencer marketing and traditional advertising can achieve broad reach and foster trust—yet they do so with different strengths and challenges. Influencer marketing builds trust through personal, authentic endorsements that resonate with targeted audiences, often leading to higher engagement and a sense of community. Traditional advertising, on the other hand, leverages the credibility of established platforms and can quickly raise brand awareness across a wide audience.
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