“My objective is not a sale but the story we are going to create with the customer,” said Nicolas Sala, omni-channel and client experience director at the luxury French jewelry house Boucheron.
Omni-channel and client experience director?
Luxury brands today are focused — obsessed, some headhunters and luxury insiders say — on building personal, emotional relationships with clients. And to deliver on that strategy, many have created jobs with titles like chief consumer officer, chief experience officer, and chief digital and client officer.
Such consumer-centric positions have been around for years in industries like banking and hospitality but they only recently started popping up in the luxury sector. “Luxury and fashion brands are finally starting to concentrate on what customers expect from them,” said Jean Révis of MAD Network, a luxury consultancy and headhunting firm in Paris.
And the new focus is, he added, “a radical change from their previous top-down view of the world, when they got away with simply imposing their creative vision without taking into consideration customers’ expectations.”
Those expectations are Mr. Sala’s job. “We are not aiming for a one-shot sale but to make the customer feel that he or she is part of the maison,” he said. So, for example, he has helped sales assistants learn how to build customer relationships, and sees his mission as making “sure that the customer gets a personalized service both online and offline and that there is no point of friction between the two.”
“These are new jobs,” said Mr. Sala, who previously was watch marketing manager at Van Cleef & Arpels and its high jewelry product manager. “So, of course, when I started my career, I never expected to do this job today, and I am sure that my job as it is today will be completely different in a few years.”
Some of the executives filling these new “C” (or “chief”) level positions have luxury retail, e-commerce and technology backgrounds, dovetailing well with the brands’ new and future customers, who are glued to their cellphones and routinely browse the internet before buying. But others come from very different fields.
Givenchy, for example, has a new global customer experience director, Guillaume Desjardins, who previously worked at Ralph Lauren and the five-star Le Bristol hotel in Paris. Francesca Danzi, a customer experience and luxury retail consultant, became chief client officer at Tory Burch in July.
And in June, Kenzo appointed a chief client and digital officer, Bruno Alazard, whose experience included jobs at Estée Lauder, L’Oréal and Yahoo.
Yet Moët Hennessy, the wine and spirits group that is part of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, hired Laure Baume as its chief consumer officer, although she had no luxury experience. She previously worked for Club Med; Aéroports de Paris, which operates the three Paris airports; and Kraft Foods.
Much has been written about luxury brands and retailers increasing their emphasis on customer service in their brick and mortar stores, but at Gucci, one of fashion’s biggest recent success stories under its creative director Alessandro Michele, the effort has included creating the job of store connector.
In the brand’s description of the Wooster Street store that opened in New York’s SoHo neighborhood in May, it said store connectors would “connect clients to Gucci in a new, emotional way to discover the house’s latest products and collaborations” — along with in-store features like a Gucci app whose augmented reality features allow customers to experiment with product customization on the spot.
“Being able to connect the online and physical customer journey,” said Luke Timmins, the store experience manager at Browns East in London, “is key in creating a seamless experience that puts the customer first by being personal, efficient and inspiring across all channels.”
Farfetch, the online luxury retailer that owns Browns, is using the store to test technology that includes an app to track everything customers touch or try, which it plans to roll out at the Browns flagship in Mayfair and at some Chanel stores next year, thanks to a partnership the two companies signed earlier this year.
Yet even as luxury houses expand their ranks with customer service hires — as well as data analysts to manage and interpret the information, like shopping and travel habits, that they now are gathering — some industry experts say the transitions could be difficult. “I am wary of catapulting people from the technology and engineering worlds to executive positions as they come from a different corporate culture, which means that they might not be easy to integrate,” said Marie-Aude Stocker, director of people, development and prospective at Van Cleef & Arpels, where she also is a member of the executive committee.
Most luxury brands have hierarchical lines of command and long decision-making processes, the kind of traditional organization that can be difficult for outsiders to navigate, especially those from the more freewheeling corporate cultures of Silicon Valley, start-ups and consultancies.
Challenging entrenched management could become frustrating, industry insiders say, leading to a loss of motivation and, in the end, preventing new executives from delivering on the changes they were hired to make.
“Middle managers all say they want change but ‘not in my department,’” said Antoinette Lemens, an executive search specialist in Paris. “It is too early days to know if people in such new positions as chief digital officer will be successful as it is certainly not an easy job!”
Last December, for example, Kering hired Grégory Boutté, a former general manager of eBay France, as its chief digital and client officer, joining such pioneer chief digital officers as Ian Rogers, who left Apple Music to join LVMH in 2015, and Lubomira Rochet, who worked at Microsoft and the consulting and technology company Capgemini, before moving to L’Oréal in 2014.
In all these new positions, “I think brands are experimenting,” said Grace Nida, managing director of the global luxury sector at Korn Ferry International, an organizational consulting firm. “But one thing is clear: they need the full support of the C.E.O.; otherwise they will not be able to drive the transformation for which they were hired.”
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