, ,

Data + Scale + Exclusivity = Luxury Pavilion

WM Circle Logo

By: Wise Marketer Staff |

Posted on April 18, 2018

If you’ve never heard of Luxury Pavilion it’s likely because you are, as I am, not qualified to be part of it. No need to get bent out of shape though, even if you are part of the upper-est tier, the only way to get in is through invitation. I’m still waiting by the mailbox for mine.

By Wise Marketer Staff

Exclusivity, as a loyalty trigger, has been known and applied for eons – it’s not a new notion by any means. But exclusivity enabled by technology and powered by one of the world’s greatest data caches – that’s something to talk about.

According to Glossy, “Nearly a year after rolling out its high-end brand hub, the Luxury Pavilion, Tmall is building a luxury loyalty club to offer more benefits to the 100,000 Luxury Pavilion customers who spend more than $159,000 per year through Alibaba.” For context, the average Amazon Prime member spends just north of $1,300 per year – you get the picture. Side note: On Tmall, millennial customers account for about half of Luxury Pavilion’s clientele. Yes, millennials.

The new Luxury Pavilion Club offers those top-tier customers a suite of benefits that includes:

  • exclusive sales
  • event invites
  • flexible payment options
  • first access to new products, and more.

There are two tiers to the program, with a premium membership providing customers with a personal shopping concierge and offline perks like spa sessions and hotel stays.

Aside from shear scale, on the face of it, Luxury Pavilion is just the latest iteration of a time-tested tiered loyalty program. But look at the engine that powers it and you start to see orders of magnitude that really have never existed before.

To wit – there are 500 million users on the Tmall platform – the underlying tech that enables Luxury Pavilion. According to Jessica Liu, president of Tmall Fashion and Luxury, “Tmall is using machine learning to not only identify luxury customers but also to predict the brands and items they will be most likely to purchase. Through Tmall’s brand dashboard, brands can identify customer behavior across online and in-store channels. Premium members also get access to a personal shopper who can make purchases and returns in local stores on their behalf.”

Liu continues, ““In traditional retail, it takes incredibly long to get customer feedback. You design, you ship to a retailer, they sell to the customer — it takes months,” said Liu. “We open the data feedback loop as soon as a product goes live on the site. You can react immediately. Quick feedback is very important today, because the consumer is changing so quickly.”

Alibaba has already proven that it can squeeze the right juice out of the massive data trove it controls - can their luxe effort meet those same standards?