This guest post is from Stuart Foster who blogs at TheLostJacket.com. All views in the post are the author’s alone. If you’re interested in guest posting on the Sustainable Marketing Blog, please email me your guest post idea, and let’s take it from there. Thanks!
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How do you deal with a high end brand online? The very nature of being online insists that it be accessible to everyone. But what if you have positioned your product as something that everyone wants to aspire to? How do you realign those brand goals with the online world of accessibility?
Premium brands like Coach, J. Crew and LL Bean are struggling with this conundrum. So, how do you create a community around a brand that is limiting? Be honest. You have a brand that everyone wants to be a part of. You can use this to your advantage.
How? The notoriety and recognition are already there; use it to your advantage. You just have to know how to pitch the product. For example, I’d love a Burberry or Lacoste shirt. If either brand let me demo their products I’d gladly do so. It would be an interesting case study for marketing position AND the quality of the clothes speaks for themselves.
Experiential marketing (and allowing individuals freedom over how to use the product) will take your brand to another level. Have fun with the product: let people destroy it, personify it, create random videos about it. The key is going to be letting go and being honest about your minimal level of knowledge within the space. If you’ve created a great brand identity you will be amazed at the amount of help you will be able to rely on from the pre-existing community.
Nothing would be cooler to me then Lacoste coming out and saying: “We’d love to be online in a major way. We just don’t know where to start. What do you suggest?” Plenty of evangelists exist, they just need to be appropriately catered to and leveraged.
What are some suggestions of ways you can effectively engage an audience with premium brands beyond the ways that I just mentioned here? Would you go viral video, blog, branch off from your Ajax site? Get creative!
Stuart Foster is a marketing consultant in the Boston area. He specializes in brand management, social media, and blog outreach. He authors a blog at TheLostJacket.com and is a Social Media Strategist at Mullen.
