Is luxury (still) afraid of the Internet?

Abstract

The world has changed because of the digital revolution and it will keep changing. This change is currently being felt by every society in all their facets and will continue to resound in every business sector whether technology-driven or unreceptive to transformation. It is a reality that can no longer be questioned or resisted, even by an industry that carries as much economic and socio-cultural clout as the luxury sector. The reverberation of this digital-driven revolution is echoing even louder in the face of the current global economic recession, which has encroached into the luxury arena and has led to the stalling of the uninterrupted growth that the luxury sector has known for several decades. The famous phrase “unsinkable luxury” has been challenged by the multiple issues that digital technology has brought to the luxury domain. To make matters worse, the arrival of the dreaded word, “recession” in the luxury vocabulary, mainly as a result of stalling growth in key markets, has thrown the entire sector into a pandemonium of sorts and magnified the challenge of the digital and interactive technology. Hopefully this scenario will be temporary.

“Every few hundred years in western history there occurs a sharp transformation. Within a few short decades, society rearranges itself: its worldview, its basic values, its social and political structures, its arts, its key institutions. Fifty years later there is a new world.”

—Peter Drucker, Business Guru