La Mer Appoints Jay Chou as the First Male Spokesperson
The luxury market has become conservative and has begun to favor influential people who have withstood the test of time.
According to the fashion business news, La Mer, a luxury skin care brand owned by Estee Lauder Group, has recently appointed Jay Chou, a Chinese pop musician, as the first male brand ambassador, which has attracted widespread attention from the market and consumers. As of press release, relevant posts have received more than 20000 likes on their personal Instagram account.
Jay Chou suddenly became the favorite of luxury goods, which surprised the insiders. Last month, Rimowa, a luggage brand owned by LVMH, announced that Jay Chou had become its first Chinese global brand spokesperson and released a large advertising film featuring him.
In December last year, Jay Chou was also appointed as the global brand ambassador by Dior, a luxury brand under LVMH, becoming the first Chinese star with the title. Up to now, Dior's global brand ambassadors also include actor Delireba, pianist Lang Lang, Jisoo, member of Korean women's group Blackpink, and British actor Robert Pattinson.
As the global ambassador of Chinese pop music, Jay Chou, who debuted in the late 1990s as a singer, creator, director and actor, is a benchmark figure in the music and entertainment industry. His record sales exceeded 30 million, and he has nearly 9 million fans on Instagram alone, reflecting his influence in the global market, His only domestic social media account, Fasthand, has more than 50 million fans.
However, it seems inconsistent with his rare influence. Before this round of intensive appointment of spokesmen, Jay Chou's interaction with the luxury industry was not frequent. In addition to being the spokesman of high-end watch brand Emperor for many years, he was only invited to attend fashion shows such as Chanel and Balenciaga, but did not further cooperate with any luxury brands.
The situation has changed rapidly in the past two years.
In 2022, Jay Chou released his new single "The Greatest Works", which caused a heated discussion in social media. As a result, La Samaritaine, the location of the single MV, became the focus of public opinion. The department store was invested by LVMH and opened in 2021.
Last year, the concert market continued to receive attention due to the outbreak of the experience economy boom. According to the data monitoring of the ticketing information collection platform of the China Performance Industry Association, combined with the comprehensive calculation of industry research, the overall economic scale of the national performance market in 2023 will reach 73.994 billion yuan, a record high.
Among them, Jay Chou's Carnival World Tour has become one of the most popular representatives due to the nostalgia of the community and the huge fan base accumulated over the years, further promoting Jay Chou's personal influence. According to Billboard's latest box office list of concerts, Jay Chou has become the first Chinese singer with $8.3 million in box office due to two concerts of 25000 people in London.
Dior, who always has a keen sense of smell in the Chinese market, soon perceived this trend. Soon after providing Jay Chou with performance clothes at the Bangkok stop of Carnival, it became the first luxury brand to launch long-term cooperation with Jay Chou.
Dior became the first luxury brand to cooperate with Jay Chou for a long time. The latter has a global and cross era influence, which helps the brand consolidate emotional ties with the most purchasing customers today
In fact, Dior was regarded as the pioneer of localization strategy because it first used star effect in the Chinese market.
Since Angelababy was appointed as the brand ambassador in 2017, Dior has established a huge star matrix in China. With the dividend of fan economy and the cooperation of high-density marketing activities, Dior Fashion Show's discussion on social media has increased quarter by quarter, promoting the brand's market influence to grow exponentially in a few years.
The huge growth in performance made the luxury industry embrace traffic stars at that time. However, the increasingly frequent and homogeneous spokesperson strategy soon made consumers feel aesthetic fatigue.
An insider once said that the short-term benefits and marginal effects created by celebrity spokesmen for luxury fashion brands are diminishing, and most of the exposure is often limited to fans, which is difficult to radiate to the broader mass market.
At the same time, the phenomenon that luxury brands regard traffic as the only standard for their choice of co stars has also attracted more and more controversy. Although some people think that the brand chooses young idols for cooperation, partly because of the high cooperation and plasticity of the latter, the practice of repeatedly inviting stars with scarce representative works as brand friends has still caused dissatisfaction in the market.
Even under Dior's leadership, the luxury industry once set off a trend of constantly subdividing specific titles in the Chinese market to balance the conflict between target consumers and fans, but the brand image has inevitably been diluted.
While the income drops, the risks brought by the radical star strategy are increasingly obvious. In the past few years, Prada, LV and other brands have suffered a series of spokesmen storm, which has caused some damage to brand reputation.
After the frantic signing and termination of contracts, race against the clock and react without thinking, luxury brands began to significantly slow down the pace of cooperation with stars around 2022.
Dior's star matrix promotes its market influence to rise rapidly
However, it must be recognized that star cooperation is necessary for luxury brands in terms of expanding market influence and stimulating market consumption. It is also the most effective media, especially in the Chinese market.
Therefore, after the popularity of endorsers cooled down for a short time, luxury brands soon began to look for new alternatives to avoid the obvious risk of relying on idol endorsers and ensure the acceptance of brand growth momentum.
Since 2022, more and more sports stars have appeared in the luxury brand activity scene and the first row of the show, and female athletes are especially favored by the brand. This trend has become increasingly significant with the approaching of the Paris Olympic Games.
With the excellent performance of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic Games, Gu Ailing, who has multiple identities as an athlete, a Stanford University student, and an IMG contract model, has set off a fashion trend for athletes. Thanks to many endorser contracts from LV, Tiffany, Wanguobiao and Estee Lauder, In 2023, she will be the third highest earning female athlete in the world with an income of 20 million US dollars.
Dior also invited Sun Yiwen, a fencer, Liu Dan, a surfer, and Zhang Doudou, the first speed skater of China's Winter Olympics, to shoot on camera in the DIOR VIBE series of Chinese advertising blockbusters released in early 2022, without using any stars.
Zhang Hong, a friend of Dior's Chinese brand, was also invited to attend the Dior Autumn/Winter 2022 senior customized series show, which was a representative appearance of Chinese faces after several seasons of absent fashion week.
In May last year, Prada, who has been in a crisis of public opinion for many times because of her spokesmen, appointed Chinese professional female basketball player Yang Shuyu as the brand ambassador, and released a large advertising film shot by her on camera.
Two months later, Prada announced that he would become the official partner of the Chinese National Women's Football Team and would provide formal dress support for the team. Once the news was released, it immediately triggered a hot debate on social media. The topic of "Prada has found the right person this time" hit the microblog search, and the number of readers reached 140 million in one day.
The WeChat official account LADYMAX once pointed out that the popularity of athletes by luxury brands is driven by multiple factors, including sharing the risk of traffic stars, localization intentions, the rise of women's awareness, grasping the potential of the sports market, and creating a more diversified market image.
A few years after the star strategy was fully launched, luxury brands are no longer satisfied with the original purpose of increasing exposure with the help of star traffic, but hope that spokesmen can comprehensively convey the brand value and attract the attention of all consumer groups as much as possible. Therefore, with athletes as the representative, luxury brands have begun to build to radiate entertainment, sports A matrix of celebrity spokesmen in many fields such as art and culture.
Prada announced last year to become the official partner of the Chinese National Women's Football Team
To some extent, Jay Chou's influence is almost equal to this huge multi star matrix.
In the context of the continued downturn in the luxury industry, how to leverage the consumption potential with the minimum cost has become a challenge that brands must face. Dior, La Mer and Rimowa have all pointed to a new goal, that is, to choose a more inclusive spokesperson worthy of long-term investment.
This inclusiveness is first reflected in Jay Chou's irreplaceable position in Chinese pop culture. Compared with the fleeting popularity of traffic stars, Jay Chou has the influence that has passed the test of time, and therefore precipitates an incomparable emotional foundation among the global Chinese community.
Data shows that in the social media tweets related to Jay Chou, neutral and positive emotions account for nearly 90%, far more than ordinary stars.
Secondly, unlike the audience group where most of the flow stars are female fans, Jay Chou has a huge appeal among both male and female consumers, and can cover different circles, including fashion, art and so on.
The trendy brand PHANTACi, co founded by Jay Chou and his friend Ric, recently announced that it will cooperate with Nike again to launch new co branded shoes, and released a new trailer for Jay Chou to appear in person.
Previously, the two brands jointly launched the PHANTACi x Nike Air Max 1 "Grand Piano" series, which only sold 400 pairs in PHANTACi stores. Recently, Jay Chou wore the Air Max 1 co branded with Nike again in his video, or warmed up for the new co branding.
At the same time, Jay Chou also has a certain influence in art collection, especially in the field of contemporary art. In recent years, he has prepared special auctions for auction houses such as Sotheby's and Christie's.
The trendy brand PHANTACi, co founded by Jay Chou and his friend Ric, recently announced that he will cooperate with Nike again
More importantly, Jay Chou's fan base is not limited to young consumers.
Some analysts have pointed out that Jay Chou's fans are mainly concentrated in the age groups of 25 to 34 and 35 to 44, and most of them have certain economic strength, which can be seen from the fact that Jay Chou's concert ticket price has increased 15 times on the Internet to more than 30000 yuan, and there are still fans snapping up.
Although the luxury goods industry targeting wealthy consumers is more resilient during the period of economic pressure, the macro background of increased uncertainty still inhibits some consumers' demand for luxury goods, especially young consumers.
Analysts believe that young people are more vulnerable to economic pressure than older, wealthier consumers. With the technology and financial industries facing extensive challenges, young high-income people have reduced the frequency of purchasing luxury brands.
Bernstein luxury analyst Luca Solca pointed out in a report last year that the growth of the luxury industry will be driven by older consumers in the next few years. Unity Marketing, an American market research company, also predicts that by 2026, the main consumers of luxury goods will be the millennials, that is, those born in the 1980s and 1990s.
On the other hand, the Millennials and Generation X, which account for a higher proportion of the high net worth group, have become the focus of the market with luxury brands' bets on wealthy consumer groups. The 2022 China High Net Worth Consumer Insight Report of VIP Research Institute shows that among high net worth consumers with net assets of 10 million yuan, Generation Z only accounts for 3%.
On the whole, Jay Chou has a global and cross era influence. His unshakable position in the millennial generation of consumers also helps the brand to consolidate emotional ties with today's most powerful customers.
Behind this is the intention of Dior and La Mer to firmly grasp core customers and achieve performance growth.
According to the data of Fashion Business Express, the sales of LVMH in the first quarter fell by 2% year-on-year to 20.7 billion euros, with an organic growth of 3%. The revenue of the fashion and leather goods department fell by 2% to 10.49 billion euros, with the organic growth narrowing to 2% from 9% in the previous quarter. According to Jean Jacques Guiony, the group's chief financial officer, Dior's performance during the period was slightly lower than the average level of the department.
The appointment of Jay Chou as the global brand ambassador will undoubtedly open a new growth space for Dior, effectively seize the global Chinese luxury consumption boom, and attract more mature consumers and conform to the market trend while embracing young customers with trendy culture.
In the second quarter of fiscal year 2024, the parent company of La Mer, Estee Lauder Group recorded a year-on-year decline of 7% to $4.28 billion, and the skin care business and cosmetics business recorded a decline of 10% and 8% respectively to $2.173 billion and $1.167 billion.
Although Fabrizio Freda, CEO of the company, said that La Mer had achieved double-digit growth in 2023, some analysts believed that high-end skin care products in the Chinese market had not yet bottomed out. For La Mer, who urgently needs to attract the attention of Chinese consumers, the freshness brought by Jay Chou to the market may be the key to reversing the decline.
Brand is the product of the times. When the mainstream values return to rationality and classics, the market has moved on.
Source: LADYMAX CN
