EssilorLuxottica: The Art of Experiential Luxury

From consumer insights across the world to the latest tactics and trends you're listening to leap into luxury, the go-to marketing podcast for luxury brands. I'm Natalie and today I'm joined by Alicia Devleto Glue, brand manager for Rayban, Oakley and Oliver Peoples at Esselaure, Luxotica. Alicia joins us following a five-year-old into LVMH, specifically working on dual fragrances, which is where we have the pleasure of getting to know her. So as you can imagine she brings with her a wealth of knowledge on how to market a luxury brand effectively. Today our focus is on experiential marketing, an established and increasingly vital component of every luxury brand strategy. We're going to talk about how brands create those unforgettable, unique experiences and events that truly engage their clientele. Alicia thank you so much for joining us. Thank you Nat. It's a pleasure to be here. Welcome back to the leap office. Yes. Thank you both. In a minute. It's actually really nice to be back in the studio. So like you mentioned my journey from fragrances at Dior to now overseeing Rayban, Oakley and Oliver Peoples has shown me just how essential it is to have that experiential marketing for a brand storytelling. And I'm excited to explore this topic with you. Awesome. Thank you. Yeah I feel as though. I mean when I started, I'm going to show my age here when I started 15 years ago experiential was really just like a nice to have. Whereas now it feels like something that's so crucial for every brand like marketing plan, you know. So given your extensive experience in luxury, first Dior now, SLOR looks at it. How have you felt the role of experiential marketing is evolved within the luxury sector during that time? Are there any fundamental shifts you've noticed and observed? Yeah. I mean over the years experiential marketing has shifted from just one-off events like we had fashion shows or boutique openings. And now they're just these fully fledged immersive experiences in the brand ecosystems. Today we see for example brands really focusing on personalization and connecting emotionally with the customers. Again also, digital experiences. So like bringing the physical and the digital world together to create an omnichannel experience is also something that after COVID we really saw brands doing. When I was at Dior, for example, we had a digital world where it felt like customers were in the store but they were on their screens and we could see them browsing in the store but on a digital kind of experience. So I think that's something that really has evolved and I've seen like throughout the years kind of moving towards a digital world. So you've worked across different categories now. Would you say that there are commonalities or similarities between experiential for fragrance versus what you're doing now? I mean are there key principles to the success of an experiential activation? Yeah, to me I think there are three things that really stand out. The first and most important thing is emotion. So you want to connect with your customers emotionally whether that's creating a memory of a fragrance or for example finding the perfect pair of sunglasses. We actually launched the campaign this summer with a solar dexotic called Own Your Moment which literally was about finding your pair of glasses. Whether that's hiding your eyes because your tearing because your daughter has graduated or finding your. Or if you're tired. Yeah, I need those. Or. Or for example you want to add on your style so you find your perfect glass on that. So that's literally owning the moment connecting with the customer connecting on an emotional standpoint. The second part I think the second key element is storytelling. DR was all about like the olfactory artistry. Oliver Peoples is about the California design heritage, the vibe of California. And then the third thing I would say is personalization. From VIP events about making the consumer for example really truly feel seen and feel important and unique that really touches the customer from a brand perspective. Yeah, I totally agree and I think especially when you're talking to a luxury customer it's almost as though that personalization and emotional connection isn't. You know, it's not a nice type of it. It's really the expectation if you're not hitting those marks then you're going to struggle to connect with them. Yeah. So when you're putting together these kind of unique experiences and you need to resonate with such a discerning customer what elements would you say are crucial for making and experience really memorable and impactful? I think to resonate it's really important to make the experience feel both culturally and personally relevant. I mean, intimacy often beats spectacle and luxury so it doesn't necessarily have to be the extra vaguance of things. It's really about creating that emotional intimate connection with your customer on a cultural standpoint. So really about co-creating experiences whether that's behind the scenes bringing customers in VIP events, creating a story around the brand, bringing out the heritage of the brand and not just necessarily having flashy installations or pop-ups just for the sake of having them out in the streets. So I think that's the most important way to resonate with the customer. It's really bringing a cultural and personal relevancy to the customer. And access. Like, access, yeah. I always think, you know, when I see things, experiential things, the ones that make me truly jealous and like want to engage with the brand more so that I can get invited to them, not that it's ever happened yet, but one day. It's really small guest list, really heavily curated. And you just, oh my god, like that is like a friend of mine just put together a big event for Sandra Mann. It was beautiful. You go to the chateau where it's, you know, it's all put together and they do the harvest and it's a very small curated event. You have to really be in with the brand to get an invite. But my god, I've never wanted to be somewhere more, right? Yeah. Absolutely. And we actually had an event with Raybon and Ferrari and we brought in a driver, I can't say the name. And we actually invited two very special clients for Raybon who actually got to meet the Ferrari driver, got signings as well. They did like a challenge in store, tried to beat the driver on a reaction game. They did not. Everyone is becoming such a popular kind of brand moment in luxury. Yeah. That's so exciting. Kind of a bigger picture question is you have worked for group owned brands in the past and currently at SLOR LookSotica. They in theory encompass a whole diverse portfolio of brands with a whole diverse portfolio of products and therefore a diverse customer base. How do you approach experiential marketing strategies that need to cater for both the individual brand identities and their subcategories of customers as well as the overarching group philosophy? Yeah, that's actually a good question because I get this question a lot from my friends as well. And so yeah, like you said, I've worked in SLOR LookSotica which owns the majority of sunglasses and optical frames. And also LVMH, we know owns most of the luxury brands. So on both these groups, I've seen that I mean each brand has its identity for example. Now working at Reibun, Oakley and all of our people's. All of these brands are very different from each other but they work under an umbrella that has certain values that are across the brands the same. So for example, we have Reibun being all about the rebellious edge, art, coolness, pop culture. But then you have all of our people's being all about California sophistication, intellectual minimalism. And then you have Oakley, it's all about sports and being like super technical on the sport year that you want to wear. Just to be clear, before we started recording this, Alicia was explaining to us that they're a specific Oakley sunglasses for fishing where you can like see to the bottom of the lake. Yeah, which is wild. Yeah, it is wild. I mean each lens has certain colors that it enhances. So for example, you go fishing and you want to see in the water, you see how deep the water is so you can like kind of enhances, let's say, the ocean. Then you go golfing and you want like a certain enhancement on the grass so that you can see where the ball falls or you go, you play tennis, you want a certain kind of enhancement on the court. You go running, you want lenses that transition. So let's say it's dark outside, they go kind of completely transparent and then it's sunny outside and they go dark. So there are certain lenses for certain sports, let's say. I suppose kind of offsite or taking influences and what have you and certain kind of brand representatives offsite to do those specific things is an easy way to market those. When you're in store or it's in store experiential event, that must be kind of tricky to display. Yeah, but then again, we try to bring the experience in the store, similar to what is happening outside the store. So let's say in our store in Milan, we have literally a bike that blows wind in your face and then you wear the glasses and you see how you feel and you have a screen riding down the hill. That's so good. That is so cool. So that's again part of the experiential marketing. to bring anything you can in your store or in your digital world to make the customer feel the brand and then get them to get your brands. Yeah and they see the benefits as well, like you're really helping them along that journey so that they can understand the full experience being an Oakley customer. Okay so you've got stores in Milan, you've got stores everywhere around the world and I imagine that your customer base kind of flexes with those different markets. How do you manage then global consistency and brand experience but also balance that desire to create locally relevant and unique events for each market? Yeah so we are from the local team right so we work with a global team that shares plans with the with the markets with a strong kind of central vision but then the markets themselves take this strategy and they adapt it to the local consumer and it's really flexible and what we can do from a local perspective we're the experts of our local market so we know our customers and so a great example is for example with Reban we partner with local artists in Amsterdam and we ask them to personalize the cases of our Reban sunglasses and then obviously the local artists are well known to the Amsterdam customers but then we do the same in London let's say with artists in London so it's really understanding the global strategy and the global kind of assets and bringing them to the local market and when it's done well I think that really works like tapping into local artists particular I think it's a really clever strategy because often as a you know if you're living in a big city or in an area you really do know the local artists and you can act with them so to demonstrate that understanding of a local culture. Yeah, Sheskis. Actually you can also see it from a global sound point as well so I don't know if you've heard of Lenny Kravitz. Yes. Yes really. So he's an ambassador or he's the face for our Reban reverse aviators literally the ultimate cool guy. He is the coolest I went to one of his concerts in Paris this year. Yeah, oh my god. And he is I mean a global icon and he is the face of our Reban reverse lenses at say the reverse glasses. For us that's more of a global standpoint so we have he did a tour I think in Europe where he came to London he went to Paris that's more of collaboration on a global scale but then obviously we want to bring artists that are more localized like more niche more unique to the customers in the market. Yeah, yeah. Kind of I guess by having both tiers you get to communicate those values on a global and a local level there's a consistency there in the messaging without losing that relevance. Absolutely and then you have you also want to have the cultural relevance so for example you can create gifts that are more local with obviously Lenny Kravitz being the global kind of ambassador. So there are different kind of ways where you can pull the strings and decide what you want to do in a local, amazing market. As much as I would love to talk about Lenny for the rest of this episode I'm going to have to stare it back to experiential with the worst question and the one that you probably get asked a lot and ask a sick of hearing probably from your CFO or whatever. How are you tracking and measuring the success of experiential activations? I know that it's like instant conversions installed but beyond that how are you tracking it? It's only conversion. Yeah, but like conversion is our north star. Yeah, it's the number one thing but apart from that it's not when you're creating a brand strategy it's really understanding what the feedback of the customers is. On the product or the brand or the event or the event. Yeah. On the brand as well on the product so on a weekly basis we do get feedback. We analyze, we understand what happened, what went well, what didn't go well with whether that's the product, whether that's the price, whether that's the actual event, whether that's the staff in store. So you're surveying people on the list? Yes. Every time you make a purchase on Sunglass Hut or Reibun, Oakley, Oliver Peoples, you will get an email together with your receipt saying how was your experience today? And so most of the times people will answer on the surveys and then that's what we collect and then understand how we can improve and what are certain areas that actually worked for us. I guess that's one of the most important KPIs, qualitative feedback from our customers. That makes sense and it's also keeping that channel open with customers. It's so important. We've spoken in previous episodes about the dangers of you sitting in the ivory tower of marketing and not listening actually some of the most valuable insights comes from the people that buy the product. So that's how you measure it. When you're putting together an event and you're designing and you want to execute a unique experience, what challenges are you facing? Is it logistical, is it creative? Is something else I've not even thought of? Yeah, I mean I think innovation fatigue is the biggest challenge. There's so much happening in experiential marketing that standing out takes real creativity and I think having that constant creativity is challenging from a personal level but also from other marketers. And other thing is creating meaning to what you're doing, creating a purpose. So again, going back to what I said earlier, just having a flashy installation doesn't really create that intimacy with the customers. So connecting emotionally is what is the biggest challenge. When you say innovation fatigue, does that also extend to technology to the way that you're creating things? Because I've found speaking to a few people that actually that pressure seems to be coming from within rather than from the customers who would probably appreciate just that meaningful and emotional connection above the fanciest kind of VR technology. Yeah, I mean I think having for example the fanciest VR technology or if you go into our Oakley store in Covent Garden, we have now a robotic dog that literally walks around the store and brings you your glasses and does like all these cool tricks. These are more of the flashy kind of activations you do. But then you want to take that and you want to create a story around it. So you want to say okay, why does Oakley have this flashy dog? I'd love that job. To just sit that H can be like, I am the head of weird ideas. I love that. But then if you know the brand, you know that Oakley, the dog, or Oakley, the brand was named Oakley because the owner had a dog named Oakley. That robotic dog is our Oakley, our literal Oakley dog. So yeah, you always want to have kind of a story behind what you're doing. Yeah, I know I agree. One of the, you know, we obviously get a lot of briefs all the time and sometimes the feedback we have to give and we receive a brief or anything, let's say a digital activation or something, is like what's the purpose of it? Beyond being cool and going viral, like what are you trying to achieve here? What is the point? Because if there's no point, it's not, it's going to feel empty to exist. Exactly. I call that Todd LeBriefras one. If I get a brief and that all I say about it is why? Why? Why? Why? I'm like an annoying the luxury market in itself is increasingly focused on, wait for the buzzword here, is increasingly focused on sustainability and ethical practices. How do you incorporate these values into its experiential marketing? Ensuring that those events are not only unique but also responsible are adhering to the values. Yeah, I mean sustainability has moved from being a nice to have to a must. Even when I was in Elvier Mcha, Givon-she, like so four years ago. I remember we had meetings on the reduction of the glass bottle in our fragrances to be more sustainable. So even from the packaging of the actual product, all the way to the events, like you mentioned, so not printing out tons of bounce-back cards and having more of a develop experience. Using reusable material for your tote bags, all these things are I think necessary and there are must nowadays. Yeah, I think you're right and I do agree that there are an expectation. There's a lot of noise at the moment in the industry about ethical and sustainable practices and not such a priority, but I don't know if I'm buying it. Do you think? Because I genuinely think it's tapered off a little bit. Well, that's what they're saying. Yeah, that's right. It's not as big of an investment anymore. The use throwing out a lot of regulation that was brought in. I don't know enough about this to say with any. I can't. I think the younger audience is closer to having more sustainable products, caring more about the environment. I think a brand being able to show that and having transparency about what they're using, what materials are using, connects in a way with the younger consumer. Yeah, I agree. I think I do think it's the younger consumer that are driving it. I think that will hopefully trick a little bit. up to kind of older generations. But yeah, I think if you want to capture a younger audience and customer, then it's not a nice to have it is an expectation. I totally agree. Okay, so yeah, looking ahead, sustainability, it's not even an emerging trend is an expectation. What are the emerging trends do you think are going to have a big impact on the luxury sector, especially with where regards experiential marketing? Is there specific innovations that you think, oh, that's going to be really cool to see what happens in space? I think going back to what I said earlier, personalization, but hyper-personalization, so crafting experiences, so tailored that they feel like they were made just for you is something that I think is going to be an emerging trend. Also, ARVR, meta-glasses, now that we're having Rayburn, and those, and having experiences in stores where you're wearing the glasses and you have someone speak to you in Chinese or Japanese, and you as a staff member understanding what they're saying and what they're needing is also something that absolutely will. That's super exciting. Yeah, big impact. Yeah, as a linguist. Yeah, and then I think in gamification as well, and so having an interactive storytelling or also collaborating with artists, chefs, bringing the brand to life in events, I think all these are things that are going to see innovation. Yeah, I saw Em the nutritionist did an event with La Roche-Pose, and it was such an interesting collaboration to see a chef that, well, number one, I just love her. She's great, but to see her kind of work with a brand that I wouldn't necessarily have put it with, but then as soon as I read about the event, it makes so much sense and it brought their story to life in a completely unexpected way for me. Yeah, it's exciting to see that happen. Are there any experiential campaigns that you've worked on or attended as a consumer that really stood out to you as a masterclass in activations? Yeah, actually my favorite that I've attended, I'm going to say, is I don't know if you've seen the apparel pop up they had in Battersea. I have. It was incredible. It's amazing. How much hype? Yeah, like they brought the aperitivo, the culture, the music, all together in a pop-up, they had a rooftop upstairs serving apparel, they had a adjustable. I need to ask to risk that, serving the correct arrangements of apparel. A pale apparel is honestly like, stubborn your child. It's so awful. No, but it was such a cool pop-up they had. You could personalize your bucket hat. You could enjoy a karaoke session, you had a photo booth, you could dance under a disco ball, you could chill on the garden in front of the Battersea Park. I think that was one of the best pop-ups I've been to because they brought the brand to life, they connected culturally with the customers, and it was a fun experience to attend just on like a casual Sunday. Yeah, I think they nailed it as well because there's been a lot of noise in recent years about, you know, Gen Zed on drinking as much to the day, and actually now I think the day should be coming out, now we're coming out the other end of it where it's like it's not that they're not interested in drinking, it's that it's too expensive, or you know they're more experienced driven than like just to be there for the alcohol. So to tap into that. Also, they mustn't forget the older generations. They don't want us there, they want all the cool fits, but I have my take my money after all. Well, I think they did, I think they nailed it, it was so busy. Yeah, and going back to the KPIs we talked about, I think they made it such a buzz, also we saw stories on Instagram, TikTok, people were talking about this pop-up, that it was. Usually say was. Yeah, a success on its own. Yeah, you're right, I could not open any feed without seeing the app rolls everywhere, it's like the place to be this summer. So what advice would you offer somebody who wanted to create a truly unique and impactful experiential campaign within, within luxury specifically, what's one key takeaway that you think you would pass on? I would say start with emotion, not execution. So instead of asking what can we do, let's ask, what do we want the customer to feel? And I think, yeah, the best luxury experiences are emotionally resonant, and they're always true to the brown soul and DNA, and that's kind of what sticks with the consumer. Yeah, I agree, I think when you go somewhere and it's such an authentic, not to use the buzz word, but like you feel part of the brand, it all makes sense, and like, yeah, every, every touch point is kind of resonating with you. You remember those, like the app rolls, you're going to remember that, you'll talk about it all year. All right, thank you so much, Lizia, for joining us, it's been so lovely catching up. It has been so much for having me, it's been great, a great experience. Amazing, thanks, thank you. Thanks for tuning in to Leap Into Luxury, don't forget to subscribe for more insights into the world of luxury, and for more information about Leap Lux and the work we do, head over to Leap.Lux or find us on Instagram at Leap Into Luxury podcast.