Legend : It’s a sweet ride around Hong Kong in one of The Peninsula’s fleet of Rolls-Royces

AND THAT IS WHY WE DO NOT RELY ENTIRELY ON BIG DATA

From #HBR, Ana Brant, March 2016.

You check into your $1,000-a-night luxury suite. Your bathroom is lovely, stocked with shampoo, body wash, lotions, soaps. Your towels are plush, plentiful, neatly folded. This is great. But where’s the hair spray? You have a meeting in an hour. You need hair spray.

You call the front desk. The front desk says, “We sell that in the gift shop, madame.”

That’s not good enough.

Why isn’t there hair spray in your bathroom?

It’s not there because a) it most likely wasn’t on the mystery shopper checklist from a ratings agency — such as AAA or Forbes Travel Guide – engaged by the hotel company to help it guarantee the consistency of its service, and b) the hotel has neither developed nor leveraged customer data at a level of granularity required to know that you are 1) a woman and 2) in town on business.

To do that, the hotel needs to know you on a much deeper level by leveraging data and turning that data into information it can use to deliver a customized experience. It can’t rely on a checklist.

Mystery shopper checklists are used not only in the hospitality industry, but also in automobile, restaurant, and retail businesses, among others. Businesses design standard processes to make sure they get good ratings by checking all the boxes on the agencies’ lists. These ratings are then used by company marketing departments to impress customers, thereby driving volume and revenue. These ratings cannot be ignored. Get a bad one, and your competition will use it to sell against you.

However, trying to provide luxury service by implementing standardized processes that will ensure compliance, with checklists designed by third parties that do not know your business as you do, will inevitably fail to address individual customer needs. These kinds of checklists address the fundamentals of good service — but meeting the requirements of the ratings agencies with standardized processes will inevitably disappoint the individual that you, as a luxury business, most need.

Catering to the individual is what defines luxury; in the luxury segment, it is the critical competitive differentiator. The challenge for any business seeking to deliver a luxury experience is to be knowledgeable enough to go beyond the standard, to have hair spray for the person who needs it whether or not it’s on a checklist.

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Ana Brant serves as director of global guest experience and innovation for the London-based Dorchester Collection, having previously served as the quality manager for The New York Palace and the area director of quality for The Beverly Hills Hotel and Hotel Bel-Air. Brant started her career with The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company. Brant’s public speaking engagements have included the Harvard University Graduate School, the Malcolm Baldrige Awards Recipient Conference, and the 2014 Cornell Hospitality Research Summit. She’s on twitter at @AnaMaritaBrant.

MARCH 1, 2016 / WRITTEN BY ALICE CAVANAGH

A young shopper’s entry to luxury fashion used to be perfume. But execs at LVMH and Prada must have noticed millennials’ habit of blowing their paycheck on food, because both companies recently battled over two of Milan’s most historic cafés.

Instead of launching their own restaurants (Ralph Lauren’s Polo Bar), opening an in-store franchise (Rose Bakery in Dover Street Market), or collaborating on pop-ups with a mega chef (Noma + Club Monaco), the luxury firms bought up centuries-old institutions near their boutiques around Via Monte Napoleone.

Cova, 199 years old and now owned by LVMH, maintains its gilded aura, while Prada’s Pasticceria Marchesi, built in 1824, has been given a Miuccia-esque makeover—complete with eye-catching packaging—for its second location. Wes Anderson recently designed the Bar Luce in the nearby Fondazione Prada—another dream collision of food and fashion—so imagine what he could do for the rumored Dubai Marchesi. As the late Louis Vuitton president Yves Carcelle once said, “I’ve nothing against Starbucks, but I think it makes more sense to have a Cova next door.”

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With Chinese consumers massively shopping for luxury abroad and online, traditional marketing formulas have limited impact. It is time for luxury brands to rethink their go-to-market approach, putting digital at the core.

Wei proudly shows her latest catch: a colorful textured leather mini handbag she bought during her last business trip to Paris. Wei epitomizes the shopper the whole luxury industry seems to be after at the moment: a start up entrepreneur from Hangzhou and representative of China’s ‘Cultured Youth’, she is both very success driven and hungry for culture.

In fact, she is part of the upcoming generation of Chinese shoppers who are redefining luxury marketing through a triple change: structural change in the market dynamic, change in consumers attitude towards luxury and change in how they navigate the world through digital.

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Blog Entry by Vikas Vij in Corporate Social Responsibility

(3BL Media/Justmeans) – Luxury product consumers have increasingly become vocal about social and environmental causes, and more importantly, are willing to make a difference through their buying choices. Luxury companies also face increased attention from investors who want to know about a company’s sustainability practices before they invest.

Positive Luxury has a released a new report titled “2016 Predictions for the Luxury Industry: Sustainability and Innovation,” which examines impactful events from 2015 to forecast how the increasing recognition of climate change concerns will impact luxury in 2016.

Diana Verde Nieto, co-founder of Positive Luxury, London, said that sustainability will help luxury brands to de-risk their business and remain competitive. Together with the Luxury Institute, Positive Luxury conducted interviews with opinion leaders in the luxury lifestyle space, which included LVMH, Kering, Forevermark, IWC and the British Fashion Council, among others.

During the Paris climate summit, French luxury conglomerate LVMH took the opportunity to showcase its sustainability practices. LVMH, which owns brands such as Louis Vuitton and Bulgari, shared insights about its sustainability programs and strategies on its corporate Facebook account.

Kering, which owns brands such as Gucci, Saint Laurent, and Puma, is helping the world visualize its environmental impact with an interactive environmental profit and loss statement. To ensure transparency, Kering has presented this interactive statement on its website, depicting the various steps in production and environmental categories where it is making an impact.

Brands such as Saint Laurent and Christian Dior have implemented tactics that are environmentally sound. For instance, three Saint Laurent storefronts have been given the highest LEED certification, while Dior has incorporated responsible lighting in a number of its international boutiques.

Additionally, brands are becoming more conscious about protecting the resource supply chain. Prada has purchased the French tannery Tannerie Mégisserie Hervy to ensure the skills held by its workers are preserved. In a similar move, Chanel purchased French lamb hide tannery Bodin-Joyeux in 2013.

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By Donny Kwok and Farah Master, Euronews.com, 18/02/2016

HONG KONG (Reuters) – GPS sport watches, compression leggings and hydration packs are the new must-haves for wealthy Chinese, pumping up the multi-billion dollar sportswear industry at a time when China’s elite are reining in spending on more traditional luxury brands.

Extreme sports apparel and expensive active wear is in vogue thanks in part to government promotion of sport ahead of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, and the purchase of the Ironman brand by China’s richest tycoon last year.

The market is also forecast to grow with the government’s decision to relax its one-child policy after 36 years, and companies like U.S.-listed Under Armour <UA.N> and Canada’s Lululemon Athletica Inc <LULU.O> are lining up to cash in.

“It is huge – that wellness and healthy lifestyle opportunity in the whole of China,” said Colin Grant, chief executive of the Hong Kong-headquartered Pure Group, an operator of gyms, yoga, retail and nutrition businesses across Asia. “Luxury has its challenges but active wear is a bright spot in the industry. Some people wear it to weddings in China.”

China will host its first ever Ironman events this year after billionaire property developer Wang Jianlin bought World Triathlon Corp for $650 million. The deal is set to capitalise on a growing fitness craze which saw 134 marathon and road-running races held across the country last year, up 160 percent from 2014, according to the Chinese Athletic Association.

As part of its promotion of sport and healthier living generally, the government says that by 2025, more than 900,000 stadiums and gyms will have been built across the country.

For Under Armour and Lululemon Athletica, two of the Western brands already active in China, the country offers an opportunity to grow outside the mature markets of the United States and Europe.

No. 2 U.S. sportswear maker Under Armour expects China sales to leap 25 percent a year until 2018, while Vancouver-based yogawear giant Lululemon says its first Hong Kong store is on track to make $8 million in sales this year. But they face a strong field of Chinese rivals such as ANTA <2020.HK>, Xtep <1368.HK> and 361 Degrees <1361.HK> whose share prices soared between 34 percent and 56 percent last year.

That compares with traditional luxury titans like Italy’s Prada <1913.HK> – a maker of fancy handbags – which sank 45 percent on the Hong Kong exchange last year as Beijing’s clampdown on corruption and China’s slowest economic growth in 25 years forced China’s elite to change their spending habits.

Some of the money once spent on French wine and Italian leather now appears to be flowing into high-end heart-rate monitors and running shoes.

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The domestic Chinese market for luxury goods may be struggling, but investors shouldn’t discount the huge amount of high-end products Chinese tourists buy, as the forecast-beating results from Kering – owner of Gucci – testify.

Luxury goods maker Kering gave the markets a pleasant surprise on Friday as earnings at its flagship Gucci luxury brand thrashed expectations and raised hopes of more good things to come as more new designs are set to be introduced this year.

Gucci revenue advanced 4.8%, compared with the 1.5% growth analysts anticipated – the brand’s strongest result in three years. However, while the company reported that conditions in Hong Kong and Macau (China’s luxury market bellwethers) were still lacklustre, there is hope for the sector more broadly.

The domestic Chinese market for luxury goods may be struggling, but investors shouldn’t discount the huge amount of high-end products Chinese tourists buy.

Indeed, they spent $116.8 billion (£87 billion)) on luxury when abroad in 2015, according to China Daily.

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