Bottega Venetta and Salvatore Ferragamo: Successful Luxury Live Streaming Case Studies
Despite the massive popularity of e-commerce live streaming in China, luxury brands have generally been reluctant to leverage this medium for fear of hurting their brand image as live streaming is often associated with massive discounts and crass hosts like street merchants hawking their wares.
Then this Spring, Louis Vuitton decided to take a stab at live streaming…and the results were less than stellar, with consumers criticizing them for using a cheap looking set that many said looked just like a regular Taobao store owner’s setting, not a luxury brand like LV. On top of that, LV chose to broadcast on social media platform Xiaohongshu, which only launched its commerce live streaming feature months before the stream. The live stream only got 150k viewers in total – not a nice number for such a well-known and high-end brand, and the low numbers may have been in part due to a poor choice of platform.
Needless to say, after the criticism that MV received, luxury brands have been even more cautious about testing out commerce live streaming, until recently. Here are two case studies of luxury brands getting live streaming right:
Bottega Venetta
On August 24, for the first time in his career, famous Taobao Live streamer Austin Li sold true luxury products (he often sells cosmetics from luxury brands), selling 230 Bottega Venetta bags within 10 seconds.
What did Austin do to make this a successful broadcast and not tarnish Bottega’s image?
Setting is extremely important
Bottega and Austin learned from Louis Vuitton’s mistake. When it came time for Bottega Venetta’s live stream segment, Austin moved from his usual filming set, which has “李佳琦直播间” (Austin Li’s live streaming room) to a newly built scene designed for Bottega with a custom background and the words “天猫奢品” (Tmall Luxury). On top of that, for Bottega’s segment, Austin was standing, making the atmosphere a bit more formal (he usually sits behind a table).
Bonuses not discounts
To avoid making the brand appear cheap, Bottega did not offer any discounts during the stream, offering the bag for the same price that consumers get in official site and offline stores (12,300 RMB). Instead, they offered consumers who bought the bag in the stream a gift set that worth 1,000 RMB and the benefit of 12 months of interest-free payments.
Bottega was still cautious
When it comes to pre-promotion, it is interesting to note that the live stream was promoted by Austin Li himself and Tmall Luxury, however Bottega Venetta did not promote the event on its official Weibo and WeChat accounts. It seems that Bottega Venetta was still a bit nervous and cautious about live streaming and wanted to avoid drawing too much attention on its own brand pages.
Salvatore Ferragamo Live Streaming
Three days before the Bottega stream, on August 21, Italian designer brand Salvatore Ferragamo had its first live stream on WeChat called the Viva Show to promote the brand’s new Viva Bow bag. The stream garnered over 3.2 million viewers and featured celebrity actress Lin Yun (林允), TV host Li Chen (李晨), top fashion KOL Mr.Bags (包先生) and Editor-in-Chief of Grazia Sun Zhe (孙哲) participated in the show.
For the stream, Ferragamo decorated the background to match the Viva ad campaign. At the beginning of the live stream, Sun started by telling viewers the history of the brand, which celebrities are big fans of the brand and the story of Ferragamo’s first store. Then Lin Yun demonstrated the Viva Bow bag, and then there was game section where the four special guests were invited to share their fun life stories. There was also a segment where the four guests had a video conversation with over 2,000 members of their fan groups, creating more buzz and excitement around the event.
The stream had a very fun and engaging atmosphere and garnered over 3.26 million views.
The live stream was only the beginning of some big digitalization moves for the brand. Around the same time, Ferragamo also announced it would launch a flagship store on Tmall’s Luxury Pavilion. And Ferragamo also opened an account on Xiaohongshu. It created a hashtag #Viva 蝴蝶结女孩 (Viva girls) which has been viewed over 1.4 million times.
And on August 25, its official Weibo account published images starring popular virtual influencers 努孥 Noonoouri and imma holding its Viva Bow handbag.
Read more:
