From Tradition to Technology: Exploring the Evolution of Luxury Retailing and the Digital Frontier

Abstract

In the luxury fashion industry, it was previously believed that participating in e-commerce, especially selling through multi-channel, was only suitable for brands in lower and middle range. However, this perception has been changed by digital transformation happening in all industries in the recent years. Through a circumspect analysis on existing literatures and modifications that have been made among the luxury retailers, this research seeks to provide a comprehensive review of challenges being faced by the physical stores, prevailing situation of digital luxury marketing, and future opportunities in the virtual environment. So far, luxury brands have built various distribution channels to integrate into the rapid growing digital environment. In order to resolve the “Internet Dilemma”, luxury retailers established a new marketing strategy, which is called Omnichannel marketing. Omnichannel marketing aims to integrate online and offline as a coherent integrity, combining advantages from both channels, such as convenient information gathering on the web and in-store exclusive customer experience. The robust technological developments also indicate future pathways in the digital world for luxury brands, including utilizing big-data analysis to offer hyper-personalized marketing and deployments of high-technologies.