Luxury marketing in France continues to show remarkable growth. Last year, the global luxury market reached a record value of €1.5 trillion, with estimated growth of between 8% and 10%.

Traditionally associated with exclusivity and exceptional craftsmanship, luxury is undergoing a strategic transformation. High-end brands are seeking to broaden their audience and build closer relationships with their customers while preserving their premium image. This evolution is reflected in the adoption of digital tools and innovative approaches, such as gamification, to enrich the customer experience.

This article explores how luxury marketing is adapting to this era through digital and interactive strategies. Through examples , we will explore how to revitalise luxury marketing while retaining the elements that define its value and identity.

SUMMARY

• The specifics of luxury marketing
• How has digital technology revolutionised luxury marketing?

Luxury marketing differs from consumer logic. It is a tool for promoting a brand universe based on exceptionality, emotion and heritage.

Storytelling is at the heart of this model. Each luxury brand cultivates a unique narrative rooted in history, expertise or an artistic vision. This approach, centred on the figure of its creator, feeds the imagination. It also helps to build a relationship with the public and set the brand apart.

Exclusivity linked to product scarcity, limited access to content or ultra-personalised services reinforces perceived value. It is a pillar of luxury branding, which requires moving away from traditional communication codes.

The customer experience is designed with perfection in mind. Every point of contact – physical or digital – must reflect the brand’s excellence. This translates into attention to detail, impeccable service quality and a sense of belonging to an exclusive circle.

The rise of digital technology has transformed luxury marketing, prompting brands to rethink their strategies to meet the expectations of a young and connected clientele. Social media, influencer marketing, gamification and the metaverse offer opportunities to create proximity while preserving exclusivity and image.

1. Luxury marketing and social media

Social media is essential in luxury marketing, offering brands a space to tell their story, interact and make themselves accessible. These channels help strengthen branding by cultivating an aesthetic and showcasing the behind-the-scenes of a world.

Loewe used TikTok for a creative and bold content strategy. By adopting the cultural codes of the platform while maintaining its artistic direction, the Spanish brand has established itself with a young audience. This positioning has enabled it to strengthen its appeal without diluting its DNA.

For successful communication on social media, two levers have proven effective:

• Develop a consistent visual narrative: Each post should reflect the brand’s visual universe, both in terms of content and form. Visual consistency reinforces recognition and aspiration.
• Play on scarcity and immediacy: Utilise ephemeral formats (stories, live streams, drops) to reveal exclusive content or product launches, creating a sense of urgency. This approach reinforces perceived value, drawing on the principle of scarcity inherent in luxury advertising.

2. Gamification: an innovative way to engage audiences

In a world where every interaction is precise, gamification is a powerful tool for strengthening engagement without compromising image. By integrating playful mechanics into their communication, luxury brands create experiences that value interaction and customer relationships.

Moser & Cie, a luxury watchmaker, illustrated this strategy with a digital treasure hunt. Designed for enthusiasts, the campaign combined a quiz and exploration of the website, with clues hidden on the pages. This approach encouraged audience engagement and enabled the collection of qualitative data. It illustrates the power of gamification for customer loyalty.

To maximise the impact of this type of activation, two practices stand out:

• Align game mechanics with the brand universe: The game should never feel disconnected. It is most effective when it extends the narrative and aesthetic promise of the brand.
• Promote rewards through prestige: In the luxury sector, rewards are not measured in monetary terms. A VIP experience, exclusive access or a meeting with a craftsman can inspire loyalty. These rewards strengthen the sense of belonging and the emotional dimension.

3. Influencer marketing to humanise your brand image

In an environment where authenticity is becoming an expectation of new generations, influencer marketing is a strategic lever. Far from being limited to product placement, it humanises the brand, highlights its values and expertise, and establishes a sense of closeness with communities.

Dior illustrates this dynamic through its collaboration with Léna Situations. The content creator, who has a young and engaged community following, was invited behind the scenes at the fashion house to discover the expertise that has made Dior famous. By showcasing this encounter on Instagram, the brand has successfully combined heritage and accessibility, reinforcing its human dimension without compromising its image.

To integrate influence into a luxury marketing campaign, two key principles emerge:

• Collaborate with profiles aligned with the company’s values: Authentic collaboration is more important than audience size. It’s less about reaching the largest number of people and more about reaching the right communities.
• Create immersive content rather than promotional content: The formats that work best in the luxury sector are those that tell a story, reveal the behind-the-scenes of a creation, or convey an emotion.

4. The metaverse for an immersive customer experience

At the intersection of technological innovation and artistic expression, the metaverse opens up a new field of exploration for luxury marketing. These virtual worlds allow brands to offer unique, immersive and spectacular interactions without physical constraints.

Gucci is a pioneer in this field, with several initiatives in the metaverse. These include the creation of the Gucci Vault on The Sandbox and an immersive fashion show in Roblox via the ‘Gucci Garden’ experience. This virtual pop-up allowed visitors to explore themed pieces and purchase limited-edition items for their avatars.

To integrate the metaverse into a luxury marketing campaign, two best practices stand out:

• Design experiences aligned with brand aesthetics and storytelling: The metaverse should not be treated as a gimmick, but as a creative and coherent extension of the brand universe.
• Combine rarity and interactivity: Offering experiences that are accessible for a limited time or reserving certain content for a select community reinforces the exclusive nature of the experience. Interaction creates a strong memory, generating brand loyalty.

Conclusion

of all the gamification mechanisms available to companies, instant win games are among the most effective. Marketing games are a powerful way of engaging your audience because you can win attractive prizes. And with instant win competitions, the rewards are immediate!

This marketing format can be used at all stages of the customer journey to enable brands to engage and retain consumers. To take advantage of the potential of instatn wins, we present the objectives that businesses can aim for. For these objectives, we share examples of inspiring instant win competition campaigns.

SUMMARY

• What is an instant win competition?
• Why launch an Instant Win: objectives and examples of successful campaigns
  

Widely adopted to stimulate commitment to a campaign, instant win offers the chance to win gifts instantly. It differs from other games such as prize draws, where you have to wait to find out who the winners are.

It is possible to combine the two by adding a prize draw at the final stage of the instant win. In this way, players who have wown a prize can take part in an addtional prize draw and try to win gifts of greater value (such as a trip).

Depending on its brand universe and the objective of its campaign, the brand can opt for different types of instant win competitions. They can choose between:

• The Wheel of Fortune. Participants can spin the wheel and try to win a gift or promotional code.
• The scratch game. In this quick and simple gam, all you have to do is scratch off a visual to discover the prize. Scratch cards can be fully customised to incorporate elements from your brand’s world, or to suit a special occasion (such as Christmas or Valentine’s Day).
• The slot machine (or One-Armed Bandit). Inspired by casino games, this Instant Win consists of lining up several symbols. You can give awy prizes to your audience.
• There’s also the Pinata, the Shuffler, the Claw Machine, the Click & Win and the Flip & Win.

Instant Win offers companies a highly effective way of increasing visibility and engagement. Here are the 3 main reasons for organising a campaign of this type.

1. Engaging your audience

The first advantage of Instant Win is that it makes you want to take part, since you know immediately whether you’ve won or not. For the brand that organises it, the operation of this interactive mechanism is simple. Instant Win works by time slots designated as “winning”. All yuo have to do is enter at the right time to win a gift. Outside these time slots, all participants lose out (or can win a promotional codes in the case of 100% winning instant games).

Eurotunnel’s Jackpot campaign

To capture quality leads, Eurotunnel offered its public a captivating game. The jackpot (or One-Armed Bandit) enabled the company that manages the tunnel to strengthen its communications with transport operators. Carriers had to download a Transport Ticket Number (TTN) to take part.

Thanks to this popular mechanism and attractive prizes (smartphone, headphones, bluetooth), Eurotunnel registered more than 29k games.

Crédit Agricole’s pretty Christmas accounts

With its “Pretty Christmas accounts” campaign, Crédit Agricole immersed its audience in the spirit of the festive season. Each day, the advent calendar unveiled content highlighting its solidarity initiatives. More than a communications operation, this Instant Win game was designed to engage the community. This format, adaptable to the Regional Banks, enabled Crédit Agricole to strengthen its local roots.

The result: over 10,000 new subscribers to the brand’s mailing list and an opt-in rate of 40%.

2. Organise instant win competitions to generate leads

Creating an Instant Win competition is a great way of collecting leads. You can ask people to fill in a form before launching the wheel of chanceor cracking a digital pinata. Collecting first-party data (shared by users) will be easier. The brand will be able to refine its customer knowledge and understand the consumption habits of each individual.

Sensation Crispy de Lindt

Following the RGPD announcements, Lindt put in place an annual strategy to recruit new leads and build its base through gaing. This approach, based on marketing chestnuts and product highlights, took shape with the Sensation Cripy campaigns.

The aim was to recruit opt-in leads and promote the product via two engaging mechanics; the Wheel of Chance and Pinball. The campaign exceeded 15,000 leads and achieved a particularly high opt-in rate of 62%.

The Speedy Advent Calendar

For Christmas, Speedy launched an Advent Calendar aimed at engaging its audience and recruiting leads. The campaign was a great success, with 37k registrations and high engagement, reaching an average of 7.6 games palyed per participant. This operation provided excellent visibility during a crucial sales period, the festive season.

3. Boost your conversion rate with instant win competitions

Instant win competitions are ideal for companies looking to increase their conversion rate or build customer loyalty.
By awarding promotional codes to the winners, brands can stimulate engagement, encouraging people to visit the website and make pruchases. In this way, they can encourage an increase in their sales and a better conversion.

Showroomprivé Crazy days

The Crazy Days campaign enabled Showroomprivé to attract customers who responded to the game, while giving the bradn high visibility (with a 76% participation rate) during the sales period. The Instant Win, a one-armed bandit, was used as a sales generator, to stimulate conversion through the distribution of shopping vouchers.

BZB Game Center

Thanks to an engaging multi-mechanical system, Bizzbee offers an immersion into the world of gaming. After each game, users receive a voucher, boosting sales over the festiv period (with a conversion rate of 2.4%). An integrated conversion pixel monitored the performance of the interactive campaign in real time, continuously optimising its effectiveness.

Conclusion

Organising an Instant Win competition is an excellent way to generate leads, engagement and conversion. Discover
our interactive mechanisms that you can customise or adapt to a specific marketing event to boost your campaigns throughout the year!

UGC (or User Generated Content) is not a new marketing trend in 2024. An increasing number of brands are in fact encouraging and reusing photos, videos and written testimonials shared by their customers to enrich their content marketing strategy.

But like any popular strategy, it is crucial for brands wishing to use UGC to stand out from the crowd. If you’re already capitalising on this authentic content to engage your audience but you want to take it a step further, this article will take you deeper into the subject of User Generated Content.

We take a closer look at the different ways in which UGC can enrich your content marketing. You’ll also find some practical advice on how to boost your UGC strategy, with a particular focus on gamification.

SUMMARY

• What is UGC (User Generated Content)?
• The different objectives of UGC
• How can you boost your UGC strategy?
  

User-generated content (or UGC) refers to any form of content created by users or consumers rather than by brands or companies. This can range from images, videos, written testimonials to blog posts (e.g. a product review) and much more.

The whole point of UGC is that, unlike content produced by companies, it offers a more authentic representation of products or services they offer. When a customer takes a photo of themselves wearing a piece of clothing or shares their opinion on a new beauty treatment, they are naturally doing so in a more objective way. Their experience or testimonial is not perceived by other users as marketing content designed to encourage them to buy.

This is why consumers trust UGC more than brand publications to guide their purchasing decisions;

• 85% of consumers say they turn to UGC-type content rather than branded content when making purchasing decisions.
• What’s more, 62% of consumers are more likely to buy a product if they can consult photos and videos of people buying the product in question.

As well as being a highly effective purchase driver, UGC (User Generated Content) also encourages exchanges between the brand and its customers.

Brands that decide to integrate UGC into their content marketing strategy can use it as a lever to :

• Gain subscribers and boost your visibility on social networks. Challenges launched by brands, particularly photo and video competitionsare an excellent way of growing your community and raising your profile. UGC allows companies to make themselves known to their customers’ friends and subscribers. And so naturally extend their visibility to affinity audiences.
• Increase buyer commitment, on social networks or on its online shop. Internet users spend 90% more time on a website that incorporates UGC content (on its product sheets, for example) than a site that does not. UGC acts as social proof that reassures them at the time of purchase.
• Collecting e-mails for reactivation. Les campagnes d’UGC peuvent également s’inscrire dans une stratégie d’enrichissement de données clients. Il suffira de lancer un concours d’UGC offrant de la valeur en échange d’une adresse email ou de réponses à un sondage. Par exemple, les participants peuvent partager des photos de plats cuisinés avec les produits commercialisés par l’entreprise en échange d’un ebook de recettes.
• Stimulating repeat purchases and building customer loyalty. L’UGC est un puissant levier de rétention des clients. Une fois la commande passée et le produit reçu, les marques peuvent encourager les utilisateurs à partager leur avis ou une photo illustrant leur expérience. En échange, ils recevront des coupons de réduction pour déclencher un nouvel achat ou d’autres avantages (programme VIP, etc.)

UGC (User Generated Content) is therefore a good way of capitalising on the authenticity and creativity of your community to strengthen your content marketing strategy. But you still need to encourage your audience to share content that is relevant to your brand, and know how to use it wisely.

Here are 3 tips for optimising your UGC strategy.

1. Create a brand experience worth sharing

The first step in encouraging your audience to produce UGC is to create a brand experience that makes you want to be immortalised and re-shared on your networks. That’s what restaurants are doing by coming up with highly Instagrammable dishes that customers will immediately want to take a photo of and post on their social media.

Unboxing, for example, can be a crucial part of the customer experience. Beautiful packaging naturally encourages consumers to create and distribute UGC. The use of the product or service itself can also be an excellent way of encouraging users to produce content.

For example, a beauty products brand can share with its customers (via a series of post-purchase emails) a routine to follow. Customers will be able to film themselves using the treatment or share a before-and-after picture. The UGC will then serve as social proof and will boost sales of the item.

2. Encourage or guide the creativity of your community with a competition

Gamification is a highly effective way of encouraging customers to generate UGC. For brands, it’s also a good technique for guiding the type of content they want their audience to share. The instructions of a marketing contest will, for example, provide information about the format or the benefits of the product to be promoted.

Calvin Klein, for example, has relied on UGC to democratise its brand image, perceived as too luxurious (and therefore inaccessible) by young consumers. CK created a landing page highlighting the campaign and actively encouraging users to share their publications under the hashtag #MyCalvins.

The emphasis was on the IRL (i.e. authentic) side of the content to break down the brand’s overly upmarket image. In 2024 , the hashtag #mycalvins had over 410 million views on TikTok! This UGC competition, whose main reward was to be shared on CK’s networks, enabled the company to boost its profile among GenZ.

3. Interacting with and rewarding brand ambassadors

As the CK example clearly shows, the main reward sought by users who share UGC is not necessarily a prize.. Ce type d’interactions est plutôt un moyen pour les consommateurs de create a link with their favourite brands. What they generally expect in return is recognition and privileged exchanges with the company.

The key to a viral UGC campaign is to interact as much as possible with your brand ambassadors. Cela passe évidemment par reposter en stories ou directement sur son compte les photos et vidéos partagées par sa communauté. Mais aussi de commenter ces publications, de les remercier pour leur soutien et d’encourager leur créativité.

The most original UGC can be included in the brand’s content strategy (with the agreement of their creators, of course). They can also give access to exclusive benefits (meeting the founders, access to the ambassador programme, etc.).

This approach not only makes it possible to gamify a UGC campaign by creating healthy competition between its customers. Above all, it increases audience loyalty by strengthening the emotional connection between the brand and its consumers.

Conclusion

UGC (User Generated Content) is marketing content that is as engaging as it is effective in triggering the act of buying. To encourage customers to share authentic content, gamification remains one of the most effective levers. Discover our interactive animations to boost your UGC strategy and improve your brand image!