To receive the Vogue Business newsletter, sign up here.
Winning over customers online and beyond — whether you’re a luxury brand or a sportswear company — requires smart loyalty strategies and investment in technologies that drive next-level customer experiences.
This was the topic of discussion at the recent Vogue Business event at Legacy Records in New York City, in partnership with Bolt. On the heels of the NRF Big Show, we invited Jim Dausch, Under Armour’s chief consumer officer, and Jerry Wang, Americas director of e-commerce at Rimowa, to share their approaches to building their respective brands, while Bolt CEO Maju Kuruvilla, addressed the crowd on how e-commerce is evolving in the year ahead. They were joined by executive Americas editor Hilary Milnes.
For Dausch, who joined Under Armour last year after spending over two decades at Marriott, cracking customer loyalty is the key to success for the sports brand’s e-commerce strategy. At the centre of his plan to increase loyalty is the mobile app, which Dausch says will be the main touchpoint for the brand’s most-engaged customers. “It’s the most-direct relationship you can create with a customer. Even if you’re doing well [on the web], often that traffic is still coming in through an intermediary, like Google or somebody else,” Dausch says. “And so once you can take them out of the picture and build that direct relationship with the customer, on the same device where they’ve got their friends and their family and everything else, you’ve made it.”
Customers are then rewarded for their loyalty via product previews or tickets to the Super Bowl. Technology also plays a role: AI has promising use cases in the way Under Armour sets up its e-commerce pages, by using what the brand knows about the customer to deliver the most-relevant products to them first as they scroll the site.
Wang, who joined Rimowa in February 2020, says that over the course of the pandemic the customer began to skew younger. The brand found that this new audience wanted to see pieces in person before buying them, so they hop from online touchpoints, to stores, back to online — meaning the brand has to be agile and consistent in how it shows up across these channels, as well as flexible in how it tracks conversions. The main selling point for online customers, Wang says, is the convenience. To get new customers in the door, the brand is experimenting with live chat and live streaming.
All of it amounts to a better customer experience, no matter how long you’ve been buying from the brand. “This is the year of ‘clientcare’,” says Wang, who notes that the brand doesn’t discount but offers 100-year warranties and high levels of customer service — all things she believes will be a competitive advantage this year.
Comments, questions or feedback? Email us at feedback@voguebusiness.com.
