Online jewelry sales in the United States fell 10 percent during the second quarter of 2008, according to comScore Inc.
Total online retail sales (excluding travel) rose 13 percent to $31 billion during the period. The strongest monthly growth for the year, so far, was in April at 15 percent. Online retail sales in May grew 12 percent and in June by mere 11 percent despite the government stimulus checks which were expected to boost consumer spending.
According to comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni, the recent comScore research reveals that fully two thirds of consumers said they had not planned to spend their stimulus checks and rather intended to use the cash to pay off debt or put the money into savings.
Fulgoni believes that the impact of the stimulus may have been felt more offline, “where a variety of merchants made it particularly easy for consumers to cash their checks at retail stores.”
Las month it was already reported that Cartier was advertising its new collection Love in the MySpace social network. The International Herald Tribune dedicated and article to this action in its initial stage.
In the end of July, the newspaper reported that Cartier had already 3,761 friends on MySpace. Some of them are famous, others less so, but the jeweler is counting on them to spread the vibe through the social network and beyond.
Cartier’s presence on MySpace is the product of an agreement that makes it one of the first luxury brands to market itself in a big way on a mainstream social network.
The MySpace profile was set up to advertise jewelry in Cartier’s Love collection. But visitors can also sample music from artists like Lou Reed and Grand National, including several songs around the theme of love that were composed for Cartier. They can watch film clips with a romantic story line. And, of course, they can click on any of those friends’ pictures to visit their profiles.
The possibility of blending entertainment and marketing and spreading it through chain letter-style links has gotten many marketers excited about social networking. But luxury brands, worried about the company they keep, have been reluctant to get involved with the likes of MySpace or Facebook. Cartier took the risk, said Corinne Delattre, its director of communications, because it saw a “different way to talk to a young audience.”
“To work in the luxury environment, it means being a step in advance sometimes,” Corinne said. “We work with people moving fast. They use technology. They are ahead in their way of life.”
Actually, many luxury brands have been slow to move to the Internet more generally, let alone freewheeling frontiers like social networking. Some brand owners have spent years battling eBay contending that the auction site does too little to curb sales of fakes. Others have clashed with Google over its advertising system, which has allowed rival marketers to snatch away their trademarks as search keywords.
Gradually, some luxury companies recognized the advertising vim of online search starting to buy “sponsor links” on Google. A number of fashion and luxury companies have advertised on ASmallWorld, an invitation-only social network aimed at wealthy consumers. Now some of them are getting their first exposure to mainstream, mass-market social networks, inhabited by millions of people belonging to all social strata. Some have “fan pages” on Facebook, which allow people to post videos of themselves wearing their favorite designers’ fashions.
But there are two biggest problems with social networking as an advertising medium. One, for the advertiser, is a lack of control over the process; the other, for the network owner, is the lack of money changing hands.
Though ad spending on MySpace has trailed expectations, the company, part of News Corp., thinks it has solved some of the problem, with the Cartier campaign serving as a model. MySpace requires big marketers who want to create profiles to pay for the space, though it declined to say how much Cartier was being charged for its yearlong campaign.
In return, MySpace takes steps to drive traffic to advertisers’ profiles and to ensure that the material that appears on them “respects the brand’s objectives,” as Damien Vincent, head of sales at MySpace France, put it.
In the case of Cartier, that means weeding out some would-be friends. Candidates whose photos show them guzzling a beer at a party, for instance, are unlikely to make the cut, Vincent said.
“I think there’s a huge potential market for luxury advertisers,” said Jamie Kantrowitz, senior vice president of content and marketing at MySpace International.
Las month it was reported that Tiffany & Co. lost its suite against the eBay online auction on the counterfeit problem.
Later it was disclosed that Tiffany & Co. was going to appeal the court ruling, which relieved eBay of responsibility for monitoring and preventing counterfeit goods on its site. During the hearings Tiffany called eBay “a hotbed of counterfeits.”
The company was disappointed by the June ruling of the District Court and said the court “incorrectly held that trademark holders and not eBay are responsible for policing the eBay site.” “The effect of this is that eBay can continue to profit at the expense of consumers and trademark holders,” Patrick Dorsey, Tiffany’s general counsel, said.
According to Dorsey, “this approach makes no sense.”
Tiffany, which sued eBay in 2004, said 73% of a random sample of supposed Tiffany silver jewelry offered on eBay was counterfeit.
