Luxury brands and digital: how to communicate without looking like a supermarket

The rule: online as on paper

A luxury product has a premium price, an aspirational image, high-quality manufacturing, selective distribution, and it's chosen to position oneself in society relative to one's own circle. Online, all this has to be communicated with the same code the brand uses on paper and in store. The mood, which is the work of the art direction, photos and videos with the same atmosphere, has to be reflected on the website, the blog and social media, because the customer's journey, from first contact to first purchase, meets the brand everywhere. I can't do beautiful things offline and then build a website on the cheap.

This is where Brioni went wrong: to talk to young people on social media it hired a hipster art director and Metallica as brand ambassadors, and lost both the young customer, who doesn't buy Brioni, and the mature customer, who was embarrassed. The medium was fine: my father is on social media too, and he's seventy. The mistake was changing the brand's identity to win an audience.

What the big names do

Gucci, with Tom Ford, built a recognisable style with three elements: vertical photos, the logo always the same, white on black or black on white, in the centre. Sales grew tenfold. The style online is the same: few elements, repeated.

Rolex has the best website in luxury, bar none: stories with videos, full-page photos, product on the homepage, and it doesn't sell online, it tells you where to find a retailer. The copy is the model: “performance and prestige”, then the technical description, then the dream: “the memories and emotions it is associated with make it priceless”. For years it hasn't put a foot wrong.

Lancôme uses Paris as we use Milan: the city as a guarantee of the high end, in the name, in every piece of communication. Cartier and the others do the same with heritage: the year of foundation, the iconic product, the logo that doesn't change.

What an SME can do

The rules for a high-end brand's homepage are few: consistency with the positioning, quality photos and videos, a horizontal layout, a members' area where the customer leaves their details in exchange for something, and storytelling, which can be the YouTube channel. Compared with Vuitton and Rolex, an SME has two differences, and they are advantages.

The first is the blog, which does SEO. A customer came into the store with our article on bathtubs printed out: he was looking for it, found it, came in, and we sold him the kitchen too. The blog has to be written in the first person, something never seen at premium companies, and kept up to date: a competitor's blog hasn't been touched for years and customers think they've closed down. The second is collecting contacts: Vuitton doesn't ask for your email for the catalogue, because if you're interested you go and sign up yourself. We're more aggressive: for any PDF we ask for the email address, and only that. Then the blog articles become the emails to the list.

The budget

Buying pages in magazines isn't a profitable investment for a small company: with the budget for two pages you can produce all your content for a year. But be careful not to mix up the budget lines: video, photos and the catalogue are marketing costs; space bought on Facebook or in a magazine is advertising; the press office is publicity. Three budgets. If you mix them, you never know what's working.

A luxury brand's digital communication is the discipline of saying the same thing, in the same way, everywhere the customer meets you. Brands without it look like a supermarket on social media.

From my book Direct from Milano and my classroom courses. Figures and examples updated September 2026.