With 92% of consumers trusting influencers over celebrity endorsements, according to research by MuseFind, influencer marketing is only going to continue to rise among brands. But for the luxury sector specifically, influencer marketing is proven to be a struggle (Bobila, 2017).

Fashion and Beauty Monitor’s latest report “The New Face of Luxury,” released on May 17, 2017 surveyed more than 300 responses from professionals and experts in the luxury industry on how they’re approaching influencer marketing to boost sales and brand awareness.

Below are some results that stood out more to me:

• Influencer marketing is still a new concept for luxury retailers. Almost half of the survey’s respondents admit that their influencer marketing program has only been active for about a year or less, while 28% of these brands have used influencer marketing for two years
• 73% of luxury brands show “highly effective” results due to collaboration with influencers 
• REVENUE IS GOOD, BUT GENERATING ONLINE TRAFFIC IS BETTER. Up to 79% of luxury brands would rather measure success of an influencer partnership from the amount of online traffic generated. 

I found this last stat to be somewhat puzzling. If I were head of a company, I would prefer to measure success by revenue and sales. Because that is the ultimate goal, right?

A mention noted the above stat is perhaps “why Gucci hired professional meme makers to promote their new watches?” I remember this some months ago, the Gucci watch memes. The watch memes are what made me stop following Gucci on Instagram. I found it annoying, immature, and the opposite of what I groomed the Gucci brand to mean to me.

As said in a previous post of mine, only time and the fashion industry would tell if more luxury brands will embrace influencers. Maybe, but if so brands would have to include a budget for this tactic of marketing, plus may have to risk the possibility of creative control being taken over by the influencer.