Lessons from the Trenches: A Case Study in Luxury Content Strategy from Enterprise Brands

FSW explores common brand pain points with content and how non-luxury brands across industries seek to solve them.

Getting content right is never an easy thing for brands. Most brands are stuck between a rock and a hard place trying to sell products and to keep their brand fresh and relevant for consumers, never mind actually trying to communicate an authentic brand story with unique positioning.

With luxury ecommerce in crisis, we believe that the industry needs to adopt a new, content-first model for customer experience. This model needs to be deeply rooted in a holistic strategy that firmly articulates the why for content within a brand’s ecosystem and value sets each piece of content the brand creates from IRL experiences to digital campaigns. 

What differentiates a luxury product from an equivalent product at a lower price point is no longer just about quality and craftsmanship. It is about perceived brand value and cultivating experience through content at every touchpoint.

Luxury is all about story. It requires an attenuated approach to content to drive the right messaging about the right products to the right people on the right channels at the right time in a way that is also cohesive with brand vision and values. 

In short, luxury needs content strategy. Happily, content strategy tools and approaches are well developed within other industries, and luxury can glean many useful lessons from case studies about non-luxury brands that have addressed a myriad of marketing, brand, tech, and operational problems through content strategy. 

At It’s A Working Title LLC, the agency behind FSW, our teams work with brands to fix a wide range of content problems across industries.  

Interestingly, brands at a common level of content maturity have remarkably similar pain points regarding content. Perhaps not surprisingly, this results in common solutions and opportunities for shared learning. 

Common Enterprise Brand Content Pain Points

Evaluating private sector brand content ecosystems to those of retail-oriented luxury brands may seem like comparing apples and oranges. But our work has found that brands encounter many similar problems with content, both externally and internally. Some common content pain points from our enterprise client engagements include:

• Presenting content in a way that aligns with the preferences of developers or marketers rather than what users want and can use. Websites that prioritize brand goals over user needs will lose out in the long run. Taking a brand or organization-focused lens to content and content structures can miss important features and functionalities that add value for users.

• Neither doing ongoing user testing, piloting, and research nor taking a test-and-learn approach to content. The number of companies that don’t ask people what works for them and apply that input to craft content and content structures is astounding. 

• An absence of narrative cohesion and distinction across digital and IRL touchpoints. Namely, many brands are so busy just trying to keep up with content that they lack creative, unique brand storytelling that’s actually targeted to their consumers and their brand values. 

• Too much content all over the place with no strategy. It is not uncommon for brands to have multiple teams managing different kinds of content inputs for the same channel, resulting in, say, web, marketing, and e-commerce teams sharing responsibilities for different parts of the brand website without any shared planning or collaboration. 

• An overly stratified information architecture (often with confusing site navigation) not built to support content and product findability, discoverability, and storytelling. This is not to argue for mega-navigation menus but the gender divide in many e-commerce site menus often results in a very windy user journey just to find specific products. In some markets, some data show people visit a site upwards of 20 times before making a purchase decision. This means that even basic IA and UX errors may result in users abandoning their purchases. For instance, on many e-commerce sites, if you rely upon the site menu to find products, you may have to click four to five times before arriving at a product detail page.  

• A lack of guided, experience-driven content designed to help specific audiences find the content they want and need AND to inspire them to purchase. A lot of brands find users only spend time above the fold of a web page and leave frustrated and uninspired simply because they aren’t given a reason to stay or can’t find what they need.

• More focused on aesthetics over experience. The problem with intensely design-first approaches to brand storytelling and, in turn, things like websites is that they very often don’t have an answer to the question “Why are you doing this” or “Why does this content exist,” which can leave users lost or in a state of confusion. 

• No consistent way of measuring content performance or just making content without measuring performance. Making content for content’s sake without basing it on a strong data strategy is a missed opportunity to learn truly useful insights about your users and what they think and need from you.  

• Not tailoring content to different audiences or across platforms. Customization is fairly cheap. The traditional broadcast, organization-centric approach to marketing runs rampant across industries, resulting in heavily celebrity-driven, same-feeling, and sadly forgettable campaign content. 

• There is no formal strategy to handle content regionalization and localization, both of which are essential if you are a global brand. Cultural strategy, which includes regionalized and localized content, is critical for brands to ensure that content is properly tailored to the nuances of local and regional customs and variations.

• Sites are riddled with basic errors in UX, taxonomy, meta data and alt text creation. Detecting and fixing these errors is cheap and mostly easy but so many brands fail to do it so it is a strange source of competitive advantage. 

Listing pain points is a great exercise in quickly identifying strategic, operational, and functional gaps. It also is a path towards finding the right content strategy solutions to address these gaps. 

Often, it’s a matter of putting in place a centralized Content Strategy Framework with a documented Content Operations Model that integrates the work of content teams across the organization in meaningful way. 

In spite of the allure of omnichannel for front-end CX and unified commerce for the back-end, not all platforms and processes should be unified or centralized. It is far better to adopt an integrated model for content and commerce operations that builds connected workflows while maintaining individual team autonomy.  

Brands at different stages of content maturity also can achieve quick wins through short-term tactics and optimizations (like getting their metadata in order) and phase in more comprehensive or difficult solutions (like content governance) over time to support their longer-term strategic goals.