The Viscosity Of Chinese Consumers Has Weakened.

Think of China now. Luxury goods The "hard" market: the government's attack on conspicuous consumption and the weakening of consumer demand in domestic market; let's take a look at the fact that the fact that China's leading Asia Pacific market has significantly slowed down or even slipped, which is generally shown by luxury brand earnings reports, is driving many of the world's leading luxury brands to seek opportunities elsewhere.

However, the French brand Hermes It is precisely in such an environment that it opens the door to its fifth Herm s Maison in Shanghai, which is far more than more than 20 stores opened in Hermes in China in the past 17 years. It is the largest retail store in China so far.

In addition to the scale of its appearance, it has many differences from ordinary stores. The word "Maison", which evolved from Latin in Latin from ancient French, is a large house and luxurious home. The luxury brand also has a good interpretation of it. In a "Maison", luxury brands display products of all their products, but selling here is not an end. Brand names emphasize consumers' Comprehensive understanding and experience through museum collections, art exhibition spaces and VIP private shopping areas.

Hermes is not stingy to show his attention to Shanghai's Hermes home. After six years of renovation, the members of the Hermes family rarely gathered in Shanghai to witness its opening, and the guests they invited invited the more than 400 luxury cars of the Shanghai leasing company to run continuously for several days.

A certain degree of importance seems to match such a great deal of trouble. This is a historic thing, Hermes said. "The Chinese market has changed a lot. There are many challenges in the development of luxury brands. The biggest challenge is how to establish long-term friendship and family relations with Chinese consumers. We can't just wait and take the initiative to build the Hermes house," Cao Weiming, President of Hermes Greater China, explained in an interview. Facing all aspects of competition and adapting to market oriented consumers, Hermes is rethinking and returning to zero.

Chinese consumers have weakened viscosity?

This is not the modesty of the French brands whose competitors are generally losing their performance in China and still can maintain double-digit growth. It is a significant change in China's luxury market, and the Chinese market has become an important market for many luxury brands in the world. In the past, they almost leaned a lot of resources here.

The 2014 luxury industry report jointly released by consulting firm Bain and Italy Luxury Association shows that the Chinese market which used to drive the growth of global luxury goods market was replaced by the US, while luxury goods sales in mainland China declined for the first time this year, and it has maintained a 20%-30% growth rate for many years.

The government's continuing macroeconomic crackdown on luxury corruption and economic slowdown has greatly reduced the consumption of China's luxury goods market since 2012. This is accompanied by an important change in the consumption psychology and habits of Chinese high-end consumers, and the importance of consumer groups themselves in the continuing downturn in the external environment is undoubtedly growing.

For many years, Judy, a famous luxury brand, has obviously felt that the market here is more rational, and that high-end consumers no longer buy luxury goods, purchase frequency decreases and the purpose becomes clearer. "Their loyalty to the brand is not as high as before, and the customer stickiness will be very small, because consumers will start to re recognize each brand and will also be more likely to accept more brands." Judy said to me.

The fact that customers are less sticky and less loyal is the reason why Cao Weiming put forward the biggest challenge of luxury brands in China now, which is to establish long-term friendship and family relations with consumers. This means that the simple and extensive "shopping" relationship between the brand and the customers has not allowed the brand to go further in the past when the Chinese luxury market has springing up.

At present, the executives of luxury brands in China are envious of the long, tacit and warm relationship between luxury brands and customers in western countries. Behind this long-term relationship is not just a brand owned by customers, but a genuine customer like it, enjoying its history and tradition, and enjoying its spirit and attitude.

Enhance the integrity of experience

Of course, this relationship also requires luxury brands to take the initiative to educate and cultivate consumers. In the eyes of luxury brands, the brand house that they have built up in the Chinese market in recent two years is such a place. "Brand house is an important step in the retail layout of luxury brands. It provides better space, more stories and functions to enable consumers to understand brands and provide the ultimate, immersive service and experience that brands can provide," Angela Kapp, a multi-channel retail investment and consulting firm, pointed out in our conversation. "In any country, a luxury brand Maison is like a lighthouse like existence to its customers."

Of course, the Hermes house in Shanghai hopes that more than 1100 square meters of retail space will be distributed in four storey single story historic buildings. The 16 major products of the Hermes whole product line will be displayed in the wooden counters on the first to the third floor and the historic paintings and contemporary photographs from the mile Herm s Museum.

There are also VIP spaces, champagne bars, leather goods, tailors and tabulating workshops that are not available in general stores, showing the handcrafts of Hermes artisans to all visiting customers without pressing into the limited customer list of luxury brands in the past to visit France. At the same time, it also provides more perfect service and experience, such as more private custom service for men's clothing, and after-sales service such as watch maintenance, leather care and clothes modification.

In addition, Shanghai's Hermes house specially set the fourth floors of 210 square meters as the exhibition space, and held various cultural and artistic exchange activities all the year round. In western countries, luxury brands have always been interested in organizing exhibitions and sponsoring all kinds of art. This strategy has been proven to be an effective way to foster consensus between high-end customers and develop high-end customer relationships.

In Cao Weiming's view, from the introduction and blind pursuit of luxury goods, China's high-end consumers are getting more and more sophisticated, and they are becoming more and more critical about the products and services of consumer brands. They are faced with such challenges when they start choosing brands. The establishment of a brand house that can better define the brand and provide a more perfect service and experience is also the inevitable result of the upgrading of the consumer demand to adapt to the market.

The path of luxury brands to build brand homes around the world is evidence. These brand houses usually originate from the birthplace of luxury brands, and then take root in their globally important and mature markets, from the United States, Japan, Tokyo, Seoul, Korea, and now to China.

　　 It's time to "upgrade" China.

Not only Hermes, but more and more luxury brands are paying more attention to the investment and construction of brand houses in China, such as brands such as upper and lower, Patek Philippe and so on. Even domestic brands have begun to build "home".

To build a brand home usually requires a lot of investment. In order to display the cultural details of the brand, the address chosen by the luxury brand is usually a historic preservation building with a certain meaning. The renovation and transformation of these historical buildings also cost more money and time. In order to create a general atmosphere, furniture furnishings, decoration brands and decoration details in brand houses will have special considerations. The design of Shanghai's Hermes house also takes into account the natural light penetration in each floor. In terms of brand names, this is more "home" rather than a general shopping mall.

"Such a big investment also means that Maison is a luxury brand because of the long-term consideration of brand image rather than the pursuit of immediate interests. It means that luxury brands are more serious and serious about a market." Francis Gouten, founder of CEO and Gu Teng consulting company, replied to me in the mail.

Expanded, not French. Luxury brand They will also use House to name their brand home, but in a broad sense, whether Maison, House or Salon, they are now used to describe the most important flagship store of luxury brands.

Michel Chevalier and Michel Gutsatz mentioned in their co-author "Luxury Retail Management" that the danger of a large number of stores is duplication. They eliminate the surprise and mysterious elements that are attached to the brand. But by introducing two kinds of stores, representative and unique stores, they can redefine the brand and refurbish the brand, which is the core of the complex relationship between the brand and its customers, distributors and the media.

But this is not to encourage luxury brands to launch a brand building war after the frantic opening of stores in China. After all, luxury brands only have a few brand houses in the world and they are exclusive. However, too much expansion has led to poor service and consumer dissatisfaction, too little sales per square metre, as well as the adjustment of Chinese market and the beginning of maturity of consumers. Luxury brands have indeed come to "upgrade" China.

In order to slow down the weakening of customer loyalty, Judy is also trying to keep customers as long as possible on their customers' list. Think of the big customers who are full of weight. They can contribute tens of millions of yuan to a brand's annual sales by themselves. Last year's Mid Autumn Festival, Judy had more closely arranged customized moon cakes than ever before to greet these VIP customers. He found that these intimate services were still pleasing.

A luxury brand manager told me, "we need to be more emotional and resonate with high-end consumers."

Nowadays, luxury customers in China want to get more information than the name brand products and names are entered into the database. Luxury brands must make more efforts to integrate design, marketing, sales, customer relationship and information systems together to develop a customer relationship strategy, providing more professional and enthusiastic services, including better after-sales service, to enhance the entire brand experience of consumers.

After all, luxury brands can easily relax here, and the golden age of making money is over.