How the crisis has fostered innovation

2020 commenced with an event that has profoundly changed our life both unexpectedly and suddenly: the ongoing pandemic caused by the outbreak of the Coronavirus has had dramatic consequences affecting the public healthcare sectors, the economy and the movement of people for both work and leisure. Distances, which seemed to have been overcome thanks to the speed of modern-day travel, have again become a sometimes unsurmountable issue unless we turn to the technological means at our disposal.
In our Covid-19 “new normal”, children are even being read their bedtime stories by their grandparents via videoconference, a new twist on traditional storytelling.

Taking this as our cue and wanting to learn from the good to come out of such a dramatic situation, one of the direct consequences of Covid-19 is the ongoing acceleration of technological change: processes that would once have taken considerable time to complete are now developed in just a few weeks, large swathes of the population who had never made purchases online now do so with ease and companies that had never seen the possibility of using the internet as a sales outlet have experimented its potential, while meeting and e-learning platforms have been harnessed as work tools, as well as promoters of personal growth and interaction that we all use daily to different degrees.

A key example of this new approach is that taken by LVMH Moët Hannessy Louis Vuitton, owner of luxury brands such as Loro Piana, Lous Vuitton, Fendi, Givency, Dior, Kenzo, Bvlgari, TAG Heuer, Moët Chandon, Dom Perignon and others. It has focused on the digital experience as increasingly essential to its market positioning strategy.

Technology has gained importance in the fashion section so much so that during the Milan Digital Fashion Week held in July 2020, the group’s chief digital officer, Ian Rogers, stated that the sector now works on a “digital first” basis, while up until recently, virtual reality had played second fiddle to physical reality.

Large investments and scouting programmes developed to identify and grow start-ups that will design and market innovative tools and new ways of working are important for this reason. The aim is to be ready at the right time without unduly forcing the hand of the public, but rather offering these new tools and approaches over time, integrating more and more physical and virtual reality into every shopping experience and interaction with the brand.
Indeed, one of the key features of a truly resilient business lies in its ability to rise to new challenges and to anticipate the future, relying not only on intuition but also by making dedicated investments of resources and energy in this area.

The LVMH Innovation Award competition held in June recognised the ability of digital reality to provide customers with a bespoke shopping experience. The 2020 edition of this open innovation competition started up in 2017 was in fact held digitally and was won by the Dutch project Crobox. The winning idea answers a question that has always been at the heart of each brands strategy and essential to PR activities: “What does the consumer want?”

Crobox analyses the behaviour of each individual consumer to identify their personal preferences and allow companies to develop customised communication plans, no longer targeted at large groups of consumers but at the individual. This is a win-win strategy as the companies can create promotions tailored to their customers who in turn can avail of a personalised shopping experience that only offers articles that they are really interested in.

Data collection and analysis provides companies with access to a vast audiencewhile concurrently offering each individual an increasingly customised shopping experience. This process has been around for some time but its development has been accelerated while it can only benefit from the larger flows of traffic created by the greater familiarity customers now have with digital tools.