The Value of Guided Content: A Brief Case Study of Maison Alaïa
The Value of Guided Content: A Brief Case Study of Maison Alaïa
FSW explores touchpoint-based customer journeymapping and the importance of guided content to drive customer decision-making across channels.
The way people shop for fashion and luxury goods, both IRL and digitally, is constantly shifting. But, there are patterns in how people search, browse, and ultimately purchase.
The problem? Since the onset of social media over 15 years ago, customer shopping journeys have been increasingly complex and full of pain points for both customers and brands.
Why? There is a disconnect between how customers shop and the shopping experience brands are often delivering.
When most brands think “omnichannel” customer journeys, they think about a linear game-board-style path, say, from an in-person ad to a retail store or from an email or social media post to an e-commerce site.
However, as likely every user-experience designer on the planet will tell you, most customer journeys are more three-dimensional spirals than they are linear. As we will explore, sentiment-analysis approaches to UX customer journeymapping are useful. However, touchpoint-based customer journeymapping provides important insights about how customers experience content and think about your brand and products from channel to channel.
Ultimately, this type of analysis makes the idea of content wayfinding for fashion and luxury experience design (and we don’t mean just UX digital design) more vital than ever to provide important guideposts for customers as they travel within and across content touchpoints.
Case Study: A Brief Journey Down a Rabbit Hole for Maison Alaïa Fishnet Flats
Recently, our FSW team went down a TikTok rabbit hole, watching influencer videos about Maison Alaïa fishnet ballet flats.
This resulted in an impromptu customer journey mapping exercise that we outline below.
(Note: We are not knocking Maison Alaïa with this informal exercise. Their e-commerce site is more user-friendly and functional than many other luxury brands. We just got frustrated that we hit a dead end in our shopping experience.)
Here is a rough map of the steps we took:
Watched Tiktok influencer video unboxing Alaïa fishnet ballet flats.
Clicked Alaïa tag and went to TikTok brand account for Maison Alaïa. Watched the most recent moodboard-style brand video, dated from February, which happened to feature the shoes we loved. But there was no clear call to action (CTA) for us, which was frustrating. We hesitated to click on the brand’s website but ultimately decided to go see if we could find the shoes.
On the Alaïa site, we wandered around the homepage. The first CTA we saw was a pop-up box to leave a message for in-store stylists, which was not relevant. There was no sign of ballet flats on the homepage. The only sign of shoes was a secondary bottom navigation on the mobile site (why are there two navigations?). So we clicked on "Shoes."
Before browsing Alaïa shoes, we got interrupted by a client meeting. So, we left our browser open on the “All Shoes” page.
Coming back to our shopping discovery exercise, we went back to TikTok as we became uncertain about the color of Alaïa flats we liked. Most of the influencer videos featured black fishnet ballet flats, which was interesting. The videos felt very repetitive after a few minutes.
Then, we went to Instagram to see if we could find images of other colors styled with outfits to get a sense of how they look. Seeing mainly black and white, we settled on looking for black. None of the influencer posts we could find tagged Maison Alaïa and the only recent-ish posts we could see of the flats on Alaïa’s own Instagram channel were a flat image and video of the same black shoes we originally saw on TikTok. So, we clicked on the link to the Maison Alaïa site to search for shoes.
Back on the Alaïa homepage, we clicked on the top navigation, then “Shoes” and “Flat Shoes.” We quickly found the black fishnet ballet flats we wanted, which were happily available for online purchase. But, none were in stock in our target size (which was not surprising given their popularity). We clicked “notify me” to get notified when our size is in stock. If we wanted to look for other shoes, the page had no breadcrumbs so we had to click the arrow back to the all shoes page. The "all shoes" page has good filters by core category taxonomy but searching “in stock” or “in store” was not one of them. We were interested that the site has an “accessible version,” though the functionality appears greatly reduced.
We ended our journey with no shoes and already forgot about the influencer unboxing video that brought us to the Maison Alaïa site in the first place. We did like the option to ask a sales associate a question but found this intimidating with no sense of what was on the other side. Was it an actual person or a chatbot simulating a person?
If you take these steps and put them into a traditional sentiment-analysis-based customer journey map, it looks something like this:
This customer journeymap captures the emotional journey we went on through our shopping experience. But it does not capture the circularity and channel-hopping we did as we shopped.
Taking a touchpoint-based approach to our customer journey results in this type of diagram:
This type of luxury shopping journey is not unusual and is pretty simplified, as user journeymapping can get quite complex. What was missing throughout our Alaïa digital shopping experience were clear guideposts at key decision points on where to go and what to do.
Specifically, we needed content to guide us in some way at three moments on different touchpoints:
The brand TikTok did not have clear call to action. We found the TikTok experience initially inspiring because influencers showed us how to style the shoes. But, the brand’s own TikTok account lacked direction and was more mood board than a shopping site, resulting in us wavering on clicking through to the brand’s website. The luxury videos were nice but did not need us to do anything.
Stopping and starting was hard because we found the content repetitive when resuming our journey. After stopping our shopping journey due to a meeting, we initially went back to TikTok for inspiration but then hopped over Instagram to see if we could find more brand styling inspiration. But, the Instagram posts from the brand were essentially the same assets as what we saw on TikTok and did not provide much inspiration about the shoes, outside of showing it styled with a swimsuit.
Shopping on the brand website was easy but lacked clear guideposts at intervals and lacked an after-experience follow-through. When we got to the brand’s website, getting to a shopping decision was easy because of the brand’s highly functional e-commerce site which more or less encouraged discovery. However, since these shoes were a highly in-demand item and thus out-of-stock, outside of signing up for an e-mail notification, our shopping journey ended in frustration because there were no other opportunities to engage with the brand that did not require us to interact with a sales associate.
Luxury content is tricky. Traditional approaches to digital marketing have convinced many brands that channels like TikTok and Instagram should be inspirational and aspirational, rather than overtly product-driven, leaving overt sales-style approaches to influencers and e-commerce sites to make the conversion. The problem with this tactic, as noted above, is that inspirational, mood-board style videos on a channel like TikTok do not work because they do not provide concrete points of engagement for users.
As we noted in our recent piece about brand archetypes, today’s fashion and luxury consumers not only want to be inspired; but also they want to be heard and entertained. Stiff-arming consumers with broadcast celebrity-laden films does not necessarily do much to endear them to your brand, no matter how much they may love your brand and products.
Adding in content as guideposts, whether through actively utilizing comments, polls, or more overtly interactive and gamified content builds opportunities for consumers to engage, comment, and interact with your brand, even on seemingly passive channels like Pinterest, Instagram, and even your e-commerce site.
Even if the intention is to curate access to certain content or products, as many luxury brands do, such as Hermès does for its Birkin bags or Chanel does by choosing not to have e-commerce on its website except for beauty, being intentional with content to guide consumers on what to expect and what to do (or not to do) is critical to building brand loyalty and trust.
Guided content contributes to fashion and luxury brand universe building and is critical to ensure that consumers have more satisfactory shopping experiences and ideally return to your brand content touchpoints over and over again.