… when selling brand products online, meaning it can be advantageous to be the one in charge of the decision which of your brand products you sell online and where you sell them in the online world.
Apart from the online flagship stores operated by brands themselves or through authorized dealers currently the following forms of selling on the internet can be found:
- Especially for luxury goods there have been set up special outlet stores where the consumer is admitted to a circle of “exclusive” buyers by being assigned a personal access code.
- Further there are outlet shops in form of clubs where the members are given access to stock reduced in price. When you check on how quickly you can become a member at some of these organizations, it is often just a marketing tool to make the consumers feel special.
Both of these retail platforms on the internet they work with goods that are stock items from the previous seasons. Let’s call them by their real name, they are left-overs and hardly sold like hot cake in their day and brands are often grateful to find a way to reduce their stock in such a way.
It depends on the type of product. If it’s fashion, there is a high expectancy of the consumer that the pieces will get out of fashion soon enough and that it can be found with a discount tag on. For other articles, like Champagne, people would find it truly strange if a genuine brand can be found in an outlet store and ask what is wrong with it. Jewelry or watch brands don’t want to give the impression of being that fashion oriented since a huge investment is involved and a discount given make the consumers think that they are in front of some crime in design, i.e. that they are confronted to a piece that needs to be sold off because nobody wanted it in the first place.
Well, it’s normal for a brand to be interested in selling as many products as possible and of course everybody wants to get rid of stock. However, they need to be aware that they renounce control over how their products are sold, in fact that the ambience of exclusivity they have worked hard to give their products, gets lost. They have made a lot of effort to achieve the existing reputation and any loss of control here can be detrimental to the air of exclusivity that justifies the ranking of the products in the eyes of the consumer and also their price.
