Dive Brief:
- Benchmarking company L2 Inc released its eighth annual L2 Digital IQ Index: Fashion US 2017 Report and found that Gucci, Michael Kors and Fendi earned the highest digital competence scores among the 90 ranked brands, per a press release.
- Broader findings from the report include that 38% of the indexed brands don’t own the majority of branded search terms that appear against them. For example, in November 2017, 40% of paid search traffic on Céline's branded search terms went to resale websites and its brand site only received 18% of that traffic.
- In social media terms, fashion brands increased their Instagram followings by an average of 53% this year compared to 28% growth in YouTube followers and only 11% growth in Facebook. The report also stated 12% of the indexed brands include shoppable tags in Instagram posts. Fashion brands are struggling to keep brand iOS apps fresh, with 29% not having updated their app in the past six months and 56% not having updated in the past year. L2 also pointed out luxury fashion brands should do more to evaluate the effectiveness of their branded apps as only 18% have appeared in the Apple App Store’s list of the top 250 apps.
Dive Insight:
A key takeaway from the report is that while luxury fashion brands are performing well on social media, where they have ardent fans, as marketers they are missing valuable opportunities to attract new customers via paid search and to build lasting relationships with fans by offering a fresh mobile app experience.
Instagram continues to gain as a popular and effective social media platform for fashion marketers, something that should come as no surprise given the platform's highly visual approach and large user base across a wide swath of age and income demographics. In September, the number of Fashion Week-related interactions on Instagram nearly tripled.
One area of concern for fashion marketers from the L2 report is the threat of resale, glaringly highlighted by brands not owning paid search on terms that use the brand and product names. A more attentive paid search strategy could go far in minimizing that threat. For luxury brands, the resale threat is greater than just losing out on sales because part of the luxury brand is the full customer experience which resale takes out of the brand’s control. And worse, advertising using luxury brand names and products could point to counterfeit products which could potentially hurt the brand reputation.
