Digital Quality and the Luxury Brand

Posted by Zoe Buckingham, Head of Marketing on 09 November 2016.

At Test Partners, we’ve been considering whether expectations of quality within a digital experience are any different for a luxury brand compared to non-luxury brand.

Digital quality is important to all brands. A competitively priced, budget brand will still perform better if its website loads quickly and delivers the right products to its customers. 

The technology that powers a brand is the messenger. The digital experience needs to be seamless and invisible so that visitors can focus on the design, copy, the products or messages. No one wants the technology itself to become the unwanted guest at the party.

Why Quality Matters More for Luxury Brands

For luxury brands, the experience is even more important. So much of a luxury brand is about perception and the brand experience. Without delivering a great experience, a brand loses value rapidly in the eyes of the consumer. If you’re in charge of delivering digital experiences for a luxury brand, it’s important to prioritise testing for websites, apps, connected devices and in-store experiences, covering not only the software itself, but video and any other associated content.

The combined effect of functionality, compatibility and usability testing will ensure your website or app is reliable, user friendly and compatible across multiple platforms and devices.

Functional testing will ensure that your digital experiences work the way that they should – even if they are not used in the way that you’d expect.

Compatibility testing will ensure that your websites and apps are pixel perfect and everything aligns correctly across a range of multiple devices and operating systems, both on desktop and mobile.

Usability testing will identify how easy it is to engage with your digital experience, by testing it with demographically selected consumers to identify any usability problems, and determine the participant's satisfaction with the product.

We can also undertake ‘in the wild testing’ to understand how your digital experience will withstand real world conditions. As luxury brand consumers are often frequent travellers, we can test, for example, how an app will perform when it loses signal, switches between mobile networks or between WiFi and mobile signals as your customers move around. Will your app remember the goods that have been selected, for example?

Digital marketers are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of accessibility testing, both from an equality perspective and as a revenue channel. People with disabilities and also the ‘digi boomer’ generation of over 55s have over £80 billion in spending power in the UK alone.

Accommodating sight and hearing problems is a commonly recognised reason for undertaking accessibility testing, but did you know that mobility issues, lack of fluency with the language of your website and dyslexia can affect the way that visitors interact with your site or app? Accessibility testing and can help you deliver an experience that can be enjoyed by everyone, whilst the mystic and exclusivity of your brand is preserved.

With experience of working with Victoria Beckham, Gucci, Mulberry, Harrod’s and Aspinal of London, we understand the importance of preserving and enhancing your brand online. To discuss your requirements in more detail, please contact us.