Imitation & Innovation in China

It is said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. If true, it should follow then that China are huge fans of most consumer electronics brands. We’ve written before about threats to intellectual property. The impact of such imitators is most keenly felt by the end user, and can be mixed. In India, back in 2011, counterfeit DVDs of The Dark Knight sold for over $600 a pop. In China, where a limited embargo on foreign films exists, scarcity has spurred innovation, leading to grey-market DVDs with more special features for viewers to enjoy.

Such innovation still flouts the law, however, and is nothing new. In his book A History of Future Cities, Daniel Brook writes in detail of the Westernisation of Shanghai at the end of the 19th century:

“As early as 1863, the British food company, Lea & Perrins, was taking out ads in the North China Herald to warn Shanghai consumers of ‘spurious imitations of their celebrated Worcestershire sauce [with] labels closely resembling those of the genuine Sauce’ and threatening lawsuits against anyone who dared to manufacture or sell the knockoff product”

Today, China still struggles to build powerful brands that work outside the country as well as they perform domestically. An editorial earlier this week in the Financial Times confirmed this status, with a focus on handset manufacturer Xiaomi. The editorial rightly points out Xiaomi have made good attempts at brand cultivation, including a strong social media following that cultivates a sense of belonging that results in people attending new product releases in the same uniform and plush toys (see header photo). More could be done though. Ultimately the brand can be as glitzy as you want, but without an exciting business beneath, generating excitement will be hard: “It is a sound business, but not an innovative one”. Its product specs borrow from Samsung, its product design and launch motif from Apple, albeit with some mildly diverting software additions of there own, such as a way to navigate automated phone systems.

The risk of failure in markets outside of China has potentially been heightened by the centrally planned market environment present there, which rewards and protects national incumbents while doing its best to hinder new, foreign entrants. A domestic market with over a billion people is not a bad starting place, but as the FT concludes, “If Chinese brands are going to take on their rivals around the world, they need to dazzle us with something we have never seen before, much like Sony did with its life-altering Walkman“. Sony though will feel keenly that such dazzlers do not a sustainable competitive advantage make.

Luxury still too good for a digital strategy

Chanel is one of the key culprits when it comes to lack of digital innovation

A recent McKinsey report declared that, for businesses, “The age of experimentation with digital is over“. That may be for most B2B and B2C private sector companies, but not for the luxury goods industry. Bemoaning the woeful development and investment in strategic initiatives for luxury brands online is something this blog has done once or twice before. There are understandable reasons why the industry has been reticent to commit to online retail, based on customer insight (the assumption that HNWIs don’t like to shop for something without being able to see and touch it for themselves) and conflicting priorities (physical store expansion into China and more experiential events has been the name of the game in recent years). But with a China slowdown mooted, particularly in the area of luxury gifting, and no real concrete research to show that HNWIs aren’t just as digitally savvy as their less liquid counterparts, there becomes less and less justification for what are, across the industry, woeful examples of digital strategy and innovation.

It can’t be easy for profitable businesses like LVMH, with an eye on quarterly earnings, to make drastic investments in the online space. Luxury’s brand equity often comes from provenance and tradition; a company’s roots are in its founding stores, the connotations of Milan, Florence, Paris, etc. They also worry about their neighbours; a flash-sale site or, worse, one full of counterfeit knock-offs, is always just a click away. From a logistical point of view, there is also the issue of back-end infrastructure to contend with. For several years, PPR (now Kering) ran much of its e-commerce business through Yoox, as we’ve talked about before. It would be wrong to single out those in luxury. L2 Thinktank recently tweeted with much excitement about Bacardi’s “cocktail discovery site” that worked seamlessly across web, mobile and tablet. Well, forgive us if we don’t leap for joy in an ecstasy of delirium, but this is 2014, that should be the minimum deliverable. Still, luxury is a sector in blatant need of redirection.

eConsultancy eviscerated many luxury brands’ online presences in a recent article

Burberry is lauded by many as an outlier in this world of luxury goods, a company that has truly embraced digital. For all the talk of such innovation though, the website itself is utterly dominated by a rote e-commerce site, as are its social networks such as Google+. It is the physical stores where technological innovation has been injected. And this is supposedly the company pushing the rest of its peers forward. It comes as little surprise then that eConsultancy published a superb piece at the end of April excoriating the sector, leaving no brand unscathed. Headlines included, “painfully slow load times“, “awful UX” and “not making much effort“. But the worst and most perplexing atrocity had to be the above screengrab on the purposeful hiding away of an e-commerce platform, one that was presumably quite expensive to source and implement in the first place. We can’t overestimate the necessity of having a clear user journey through to purchase, just as it would be difficult to overestimate the amount of luxury good companies that are guilty of this sin for which Dolce & Gabbana have been singled out for here.

On this note, Gucci’s recently relaunched mobile site – replacing among other things a tablet site that had been left to wither since 2010 – was welcome news to us, as it seemed to be also (logically) to those wishing to actually part with their money on Gucci wares. L2 in May reported the news, saying that the new site now accounts for 27% of all traffic, a 150% YoY increase. Sounds good, except that means traffic through the mobile site in 2013 was a miniscule 0.18%, right? Terrible.

There are signs of hope. Gucci’s move to invest in a new mobile site, though monumentally belated, is a welcome one. As more brands cotton on to the importance of online, the Financial Times recently reported on the moves many are making to secure ‘.luxury’ suffixes, in the wake of IPv6, if only to avoid the complications of cybersquatting. And Michael Kors, which seems only to be going from strength to strength every quarter, has praised its own social media presence for “driving international sales”. We’ve almost entirely focused on fashion brands here, but other companies within the luxury sector are getting the message loud and clear. Take the auction house Christie’s, a legacy company if ever there was one, having been founded in 1766. Not only have they dedicated time and energy to investing in major online auctions, they have also recently created a new sector vertical of ‘luxury’ within the house itself. New thinking might well take new talent, it will also take C-suite buy-in, as well an acceptance that digital commerce is an integral part of business now, no matter how exclusive your product is.