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NY Luxury Conference: How fashion brands can reach Millenials

By Don-Alvin Adegeest

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Fashion

How fashion brands can reach the next generation of spending power is a marketer’s topic du jour. With no such thing as a typical millennial or archetypal luxury consumer, decoding the next wave of high-end consumption is both difficult and daunting.

This week at the annual New York Times’ International Luxury Conference, a McKinsey & Company partner summarized how millennials generally act and explained that the demographics’ behavior ripples through to older consumer segments. Born between 1981 and 2000, or ages 18 to 35, millennials make up 30 percent of the global population and primarily live in emerging markets, creating a enormous potential for luxury brands.

”Millenials have become a marketing channel of their own”

Nathalie Remy, partner at McKinsey & Company and speaker at the conference stated: “Millennials have actually become a marketing channel of their own. In a nutshell, we are talking about the core luxury buyers of the future,” she said.

Ms. Remy shared that the millennial market is worth 17 trillion dollars in private wealth, a figure that will multiply by 1.4 by 2020. Also, millennials have massive spending power, with the global value coming in at 2.45 trillion dollars which will triple by 2025.

Millennials’ spending power has resulted in true luxury aspiration. Currently, millennials are responsible for 20 percent of the luxury goods market.

By 2025, millennial consumers' spend will triple and the demographic will control 40 percent of the luxury goods market.

Millenials are trendsetters

Besides spending, the consumer group is also responsible for starting trends. Ms. Remy explained that it is because of millennials that smart wearables and mobile payments have taken off recently.

Millennials also serve as a community accelerator and influencer. This is why it is common to see a grey-haired Gen Xer in sneakers, without a tie and texting with emojis.

The influence also expands to social media as the demographic can be considered their own marketing channel.

For example, Chanel has posted 867 official posts to its social media accounts, but #Chanel has been shared by consumers more than 50 million times.

Millennials are a very targeted young audience and can help brands modernize their perception through positive likes, mentions and comments.

Some of the qualities to consider in Millenials is that they are true global citizens, they are digital natives, value driven and search for authenticity.

To concentrate on millennials, luxury should brands listen to the generation’s wants and values to gain an understanding, think digital-first, refrain from just marketing at them, maintain an ongoing dialogue via engagement and ultra-social connectedness and lastly, make the consumer feel unique.

Photo credit: Chanel online; Article source: McKinsey, as featured in Luxury Daily online, “Luxury Needs to be Redefined on Millenials’ Terms: McKinsey”, by Jen King

Luxury
Millenials