Brianne Garcia

BoF: Speaking of adaptation, I’ve been watching Chanel’s evolution in the digital world. The website, the Chanel News blog, the new Coco Chanel website, one million followers on Twitter, 7 million fans on Facebook. And there’s a lot of digital content being created. How does digital fit in your overall communication strategy?

Chanel has to adapt. Five years ago, we were doing one advertising campaign per collection. Now we are doing a lot of different content and are obliged to change our mindset. 

Finding the right way of creating this content took us a while, but now we are asking a lot of people that we respect to give us their vision of the brand. We call them contributors to the brand. They are part of the company, friends of the company, who can create content and give us their vision of the brand.

What we want today — and the way we use digital — is to have more and more people come to the boutique to see the product, to touch the product, but also to try the product. And that, for me, is the most important part.

But whatever we do, at the end of the day, our goal is to make people come to the boutique: to touch, see and try on the clothes and be exposed to our accessories. 

I think this is an excellent example of how one of the most lucrative luxury fashion brands in the world approaches digital and producing content. I always complain that many of the older fashion houses are so slow to adapt to anything new that they’re often left behind by cooler labels, or at least labels with kick ass digital and PR teams. However, I understand Pavlovky’s approach to digital here. The end goal is to get poeple to desire the product enough that they visit a store, touch and try on, and purchase. The path from content creation —> purchase is a conversion funnel I think a lot of brands, luxury or not, are struggling with. And it seems the solution, for Chanel, and also for major heritage brands like Coca Cola, is this idea of turning those fans or experts in the brand’s vision or mission into “contributors” and “friends” of the brand by allowing them to contribute to the product, message, etc.