How LVMH Manages Their 70 Maisons in the Digital Age

Having the pleasure to collaborate with LVMH as a well-seasoned e-business specialist, we at SQLIwere well aware of the fact that you really can’t throw away this wealth of knowledge and know-how. So we created a set of e-commerce and omnichannel guidelines that helps LVMH coach its Houses in this digital age, while still allowing each House to put its unique savoir-faire and heritage at the heart of the strategy. In his blog, we’ll show how this approach works for any brand.

How do you translate unique strengths and know-ho into the digital age?

SQLI does not believe in one size fits all. While best practices are a good starting point and there’s much we can learn from them, they don’t take into account the specificities of your brand and organization.

Our five-step model allows us to take both sides into account:

• Outside-in view: what does the market look like, what are the trends and best practices?
• Inside-out view: what are you good at and how can we translate these strengths into the digital age?

Step 1. Start from the market

As the market creates the context for your success, this is the first place to explore. Is the overall marketing in your sector growing? How digitally mature are the customers, the competitors and the institutions? Which disruptive trends are on the horizon? What is your organization’s current position within this market?

Answering these questions will give you a general idea of where you could go and how much effort it will take to get there.

Read more about how LVMH coached its 70 Maisons on digital transformation . 

Step 2. Determine your ambition & strategy

Once you know where you could go, you then determine where you want to go and how you will get there. Do you want to follow or exceed market trends? Maybe even be a trendsetter?

Who will your customers be and how will you provide value to them? A unique brand with a unique heritage, means you also have your own unique customers. You should not try to please the entire market. What are your core strengths, those main reasons these customers buy from you?

Step 3. Building blocks

This is where we take a good look at those core strengths and translate them into the digital world. Do you have unique high quality products or service offerings? How can you best convey these traits in your online product content and media? Are you the friendliest in the business? How can you integrate customer service with your digital approach or even put it at the heart of your business?

In this step, we look at a cluster of seven topics:

 

To make sure we keep the ideal mix of inside-out and outside-in, the market, ambition and strategy are the starting point when defining an approach for each topic. The seven topics may be universal, the possible approaches within each topic certainly are not.

Step 4. Roadmap

In this step, we put everything together in one big masterplan and determine a roadmap to get from your current situation to the new approach you designed.

The key here is to incorporate a learning phase, especially if you are rolling out your approach to multiple countries. This allows you to test and improve the assumptions you made in the building blocks phase and create an even better fit for your brand.

Step 5. Build for success

Recent research shows there are four key factors that determine e-commerce and omnichannel success. Defining the strategy and building blocks are two of them. The other two factors are both related to the people that work at your organization: talent and culture.

This is another place where the uniqueness of a brand and its longstanding know-how can really shine. As digital is quite a new playing field, more often than not, the digital team consists of new hires and sometimes external agencies. Although there’s no denying that digital talent is an important success factor, the strength, knowledge and savoir-faire are most often found in other departments. Therefore, integrating digital into all areas and departments and making it a part of your company culture is the best recipe for digital success.