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This holiday season, chatbots will be pulling double-duty, offering personal services and carrying on human-like conversations.

Luxury Daily is inviting opinion pieces on luxury advertising, marketing, media and retail issues that affect marketers as they run multichannel programs for branding as well as customer acquisition, retention and reactivation.

India’s growing luxury consumer base has the money to splurge, but wants a clear and real value proposition from luxury brands.

The truth is that luxury can only work if the products are unexpected and unplanned. Creation goes beyond a system or habits and the organization of a luxury house has to allow for this. This is where the manager comes in.

To put an article of clothing in the same category as a painting or a sculpture, fashion houses must to be the subject of museum exhibits. If we look at semantics, the word “couturier” or “dressmaker” has disappeared. The new terminology is “artistic director.”

Best Buy, Target and Walmart all have remained flat in their mobile penetration for two solid years. During that time, Amazon has nearly doubled its monthly mobile impressions.

This summer’s back-to-school season was the most profitable ever, grossing almost $84 billion. The Generation Z demographic – consumers ages 21 and younger – likely played a major role in this success and retailers are taking note.

For a number of reasons, having a proper IP foundation is crucial – but one reason which runs counter to most people’s thinking stands out above all. In American law, in the absence of a positive right, copying is both permitted and encouraged.

For older luxury markets in North America and Europe, the idea of status connects more directly with personal achievement. For younger buyers, status also equates to exclusivity.

The things that define a luxury experience in digital are not the things that people seem to think they are.

Without fail, we start to see back-to-school marketing campaigns begin to rollout mid-summer, holiday promotions at the beginning of fall and then Valentine’s Day emails start rolling in right after New Year’s – and the cycle continues each year for each and every holiday.

What today’s consumers demand is a fully connected experience, one where everything comes together to create a quick, painless and satisfying shopping experience.

The democratization of luxury brands and the rise of accessible luxury mean that loud signals are becoming increasingly visible and losing their luxury cachet.

The one thing that many brands have to differentiate themselves is their in-store experience.

The explosion of branded content on social media is a well-known phenomenon. However, its influence in the context of a purchase-decision driver has been less debated and quantified.

The worldwide luxury business spent $1.01 billion on digital advertising in 2016, an increase of 63 percent since 2013, per media services agency Zenith Media. Over the same period, spending on magazine ads dropped 8 percent to $2.6 billion, claimed Zenith.

What might appear as necessary for survival in the non-luxury retail world – in this case, data-driven marketing – might destroy what makes luxury so special.

Luxury brands have historically looked to a single target for sales growth in the United States: adults ages 40-plus with annual household incomes of more than $250,000. The problem is, this segment is spending less on top-tier products.

Customer entitlement reflects an individual customer’s sense of being special and deserving of immediate attention.

As Apple strives to improve the user experience, it is also pushing a more restrictive ad-tracking policy that will make it far more difficult for advertisers to target their desired audiences and for publishers to optimize their advertising revenues.

The challenge for brands and retailers is how to convert video views into product sales.