As a brand, how are you catering to local markets? As the world becomes increasingly global, the consumer looks for more localized brands and experiences. They expect to see their culture, lifestyle, and ideals reflected in the brand’s preferences. Therefore, localizing is a crucial step in your marketing and promotions.
To give you an even better understanding, consider our recent collaboration with Korean luxury skincare brand, The History of Whoo. As a 3D creative studio, we’ve included certain popular elements of Korean culture and history and the result is as follows:
- Consumers spent 7 minutes on average with the product in the virtual space.
- The user’s visit time increased by 4 minutes when compared to traditional methods.
This is largely in because the local consumers could relate to their cultural element in the VR tour. This emphasizes the need to change your strategy as a luxury brand.
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As a luxury marketer, you always seek to build a stronger bond with your local audiences. We understand this comes with several challenges. Providing in-depth knowledge into localization marketing, we are covering:
Challenges for the Luxury Industry in the 21st Century
Diversification
The improvements in technology have brought the world closer. Due to increased globalization, luxury brands now boast consumers from as many countries as possible. This diversification in terms of customers has brought in two perspectives that present the challenge of localization marketing for these labels.
- Cultural Perspective: One of the strongest factors that influence consumers’ purchase decisions is a sense of belonging. Consequently, they want to associate themselves with the brands that resonate with their thinking, beliefs, and understanding. The current global strategies of luxury brands are effective but fail so in creating in-depth bonds with the buyers.
To make consumers feel a part of the brand, a different tactic has be to applied- localization marketing. In custom-tailoring, the promotional practices, and culture stands in the first place as it accurately describes tight-knit social communities.
- Generational Perspective: Developments in science and technology have segmented the consumer population into various generations. The youngest and growing generation, Gen Z consumers have completely different perspectives on consumption and luxury brands.
Brought up with the convenience of technology, these digital natives consider consumption as an extension of themselves. Moreover, they love brands that reflect their goals, ideals, values, and thoughts. In other words, luxury consumption has become a new medium of self-expression to this digitally well-equipped generation.
Therefore, Luxury brands have to pay attention to fine-tuning their promotions to the next largest consumer domain. In short, it’s the localization marketing strategy again.
Digitalization
Perhaps, digitalization is the single word that defines the current zeitgeist accurately. It has pushed luxury brands out of physical stores into the online realm. As technology reached into the hands of customers, shifting the gravity of consumption, luxury brands are evolving as well To be exact, two perspectives are involved in the luxury brands’ digital transformation:
- Social Media Perspective: Social media channels not only brought loved ones together but also both brands and buyers. It gave a great platform for consumers around the world to connect with their beloved brands. In the beginning, luxury brands were averse to having a social media presence. But that began to erode when the benefits of having social media presence were too enormous to ignore.
While luxury brands create content that helps the buyers with their presence, there is a gap in the direction of creation. As the consumer pool began to expand and diversity, the one-for-all content isn’t effective anymore. Therefore, a need for more dynamic content creation ways has arisen.
- Experience Perspective: The convenience of technology and electronic devices gave rise to new cravings called experiences. In recent times, consumers are on the lookout for brands that offer personalized experiences.
In the cut-throat market, brands have begun including experiences in their marketing materials. These experiences are designed to engage the audience to make them feel connected and satisfied with their purchases.
They turn the simple shopping process into beautiful and exciting memories for the consumers. Also, advanced technologies like AR and VR are paving the way for the experience economy in the 21st century.
The change in consumer domain paired with globalization and digitization are major forces behind the luxury brands’ digital transformation.
Why Adapt your Marketing Initiatives Using Local Elements?
Localization marketing is a process in which brands modify the elements of campaigns to a region’s needs and likes. It insinuates the brand’s knowledge of the regional culture, language, social norms customs, and behaviors.
An attribute of luxury brands’ digital transformation, localization marketing has advantages for brands wanting to grow their sales and consumer bases.
Meticulous Storytelling
In today’s market, storytelling is what attracts customers to brands. With an interesting narrative, brands can further deepen their art of storytelling by adding the elements of culture and customs. Besides adding the elements, brands can draw inspiration and craft the stories in such a way that audiences can instantly see themselves in the narrative.
Emotional Bonding
From mere fulfillment of necessities, consumption has developed into a vehicle for psychological connection. From a large pool of available products and services, consumers choose the ones that speak to their tastes and ideals.
About 80% of the customer today buy from brands that offer tailormade experiences. This number clearly explains the need for emotional bonding through purchases in the 21st century. Therefore, the best way to cater to the needs of culturally diverse regions is localization marketing.
Luxury brands can easily customize their message to various target audiences by putting together cultural elements and technology.
Competitive Edge
Globalization while improving expansion, also brings fierce competition into the picture. With dwindling consumer attention and the goods saturation, it’s sometimes hard to break into regional markets.
To stand out from the local brands, global luxury brands require localization marketing. This way, they can make consumers understand their dedication to understanding and representing them.
Social and E-commerce Platforms
Alongside cultures, there are differences in the usage of social and e-commerce channels, especially in countries like China and Korea. As the consumers in such regions use different platforms, luxury brands need to position and localize their offerings on them. This facilitates seamless connection and engagement with the target audience.
Consumer Insights
Aforementioned, luxury brands have to rely on third-party platforms to be able to understand the local customers. This although, provides useful data about consumers’ likes and tastes, doesn’t always answer the question brands look for. 3D solutions help brands dive deeper into the minds and hearts of buyers.
When a brand launches an AR or VR experience, it’s usually on the brand’s platforms like an application or a website. This allows brands to connect directly with the audience, bringing in richer insights.
3D technology helps in custom tailoring luxury brands’ content to local cultures, influences and customs.
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How 3D Technologies help your brand to tap into local cultures?
Flexibility
3D technology offers flexibility in four key areas of marketing:
Time: Creating content for localization campaigns using 3D solutions takes almost 1/4th of the time taken if done in traditional ways. Numerous visual imagery can be created within a short frame of time, freeing up space for more impact works.
Effort: As opposed to a list of resources in existing methods, 3D technology requires an artist with a solid artistic concept. This significantly brings down the needed resources while keeping the quality of campaigns as high as possible.
Modifications: 3D technology allows us to make an infinite number of changes irrespective of the time of launches. Putting together the insights before and after the launch, brands can alter the campaign to make it more effective and appealing.
Creativity: Every element in a 3D campaign is created using computers. Therefore, brands can create images and videos that are not really possible in the physical world. These are the experiences that are beyond imagination, yet deeply captivate the audience.
ROI
From the financial point of view, 3D solutions are a great substitute for existing methods with high returns on investment. Regardless of the budget input, the content created by 3D artists, is impactful, bringing in more leads to the brands. Even if the budget is limited, a lot of 3D content can be created that suits the brands’ needs.
Data Ownership
Through 3D solutions, brands own the data streams that come from their own platform instead of relying on third-party platforms. This makes a lot of differences when plotting and tracing out patterns from valuable consumer data. Luxury labels can understand the audience on a deeper level, allowing them to create even more interesting consumer experiences.
Our recent collaboration with Korean luxury brand, The History of Whoo.
Digital Experiences Enhancing Your Local Marketing initiatives
AR Filters
To connect deeply with the local audience, luxury brands are adopting augmented reality in their strategies. To make passive online shopping more exciting and interesting, they are creating AR filters that have try-on functionality. This allows consumers to interact with the products even before the purchase.
To make shopping experiences more localized, brands are using location-based AR. That is to say, customized digital content like videos, images, and audio are augmented to pre-defined geographical locations. Through mobile devices, users can easily access and interact with the virtual content. Through this feature, luxury brands can offer their customers with most relevant content on a personal level.
To excite the audience, brands can create AR gaming filters that are filled with fun. This surely attracts a wider range of audiences as humans are psychologically wired for being competitive.
In conclusion, AR filters help global brands to strengthen their bonds with local consumers with their tailor-made cool digital content.
VR Experiences
According to Morgan Stanley, the total VR/AR spending worldwide is estimated to reach $72.8 billion in 2024. The ongoing support for metaverse development, with an increased tendency for remote work and online socializing, is nurturing VR growth.
The future realms are rendered through AR and VR technology, which presents a multitude of opportunities for luxury brands’ digital transformation. Among them, VR experiences stand out as their creative immersive experience that enhances the virtual lives of consumers. These experiences are created on computers, allowing full flexibility for localization marketing.
For instance, Burberry in collaboration with Tencent created a social retail store in China, embedded with branded VR experiences. As a part of its localization strategy, it partnered with the online game ‘Honor of Kings’, tapping into China’s younger generation. Therefore, branded VR experiences are set to become a staple in the luxury brands’ digital transformation pathway.
Virtual Exhibitions
Luxury exhibitions are always a great way to help consumers know more about the decade’s long legacies. Brands often showcase their best products but often fail to understand a simple aspect of connecting with local consumers.
While conducting exhibitions in various markets, the themes have to match with the tastes and preferences of that specific market. If it’s done otherwise, the audience’s earlier excitement turns into disappointment, at risk of losing a valuable consumer. To have a strong global presence, 3D technology is the only choice brands have at their disposal.
While this can be difficult with physical exhibitions, it is exceedingly effortless in the case of 3D virtual exhibitions. Brands can create custom-made exhibitions that will tug the hearts of the local buyers.
The ongoing pandemic has accelerated the luxury brands’ digital transformation with virtual launches and exhibitions. International brands can showcase their fine and mesmerizing creations tinged with local cultures.
Bringing together the local culture and their innovative designs and collections, these brands display their commitment and enthusiasm towards the consumers.
VSLB: Helping Luxury Brands Connect with Local Consumers
The challenge for luxury brands is organizing their creative direction from their European HQ and aligning it with the local culture. Brands must tap into the culture even more and encourage a deeper connection to their local customers.
We, as a studio, understand the luxury market and the cultural forces in South Korea. Therefore, we can help you emphasize strengthening the bond between consumers and global brands. Our diverse team brings its blend of culture and customs helping us connect and shape a multitude of consumer experiences.
Hence, if you are a luxury brand looking to deepen ties with the local target audience, VSLB is your best choice!
